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

Solving Nonequilibrium Dynamics via Influence Matrix Bootstrap: Floquet-PXP Model

arXiv:2606.19430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of integrable systems have profoundly deepened the fundamental understanding of quantum many-body physics. While equilibrium properties such as ground states and thermodynamics can often be characterized efficiently, accurately characterizing nonequilibrium integrable dynamics remains a significant challenge. Here, we address this problem in the "Rule 201" quantum cellular automaton, an integrable Trotterization of the PXP Hamiltonian. Using the tensor-network approach of the influence matrix, we develop local conditions called generalized zipper conditions that allow exact solutions of local dynamics. We also introduce a numerical bootstrap method for solving influence matrices with finite but relatively large bond dimensions. This uncovers a rich landscape of nonequilibrium behavior exhibiting initial-state dependence. As an example, we investigate the fate of persistent oscillating dynamics under local non-integrable perturbations, and present analytical results for non-thermal relaxation constrained by conservation laws. We also obtain numerically exact results for entanglement growth across a broad class of initial states. Furthermore, from an information-theoretic perspective, we identify a refined structure of multitime correlations termed the hidden Markov order: the memory encoded in the dynamics separates into finite-length and long-range distributed components, which becomes transparent in an exact split-index matrix-product-state representation of the influence matrix. Our approach enables unified investigations of nonthermalizing and thermalizing regimes of nonequilibrium dynamics within a single analytically tractable model, and can be tested experimentally in state-of-the-art quantum simulators such as Rydberg atom arrays.

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

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

arXiv:2605.26903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

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

Evaluating deep learning models for fault diagnosis of a rotating machinery with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty

arXiv:2412.18980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) models recently gained attention in fault diagnosis as a way to promote the reliable detection of faults when out-of-distribution (OOD) data arise from unseen faults (epistemic uncertainty) or the presence of noise (aleatoric uncertainty). In this paper, we present the first comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware DL architectures for fault diagnosis in rotating machinery, where different scenarios affected by epistemic uncertainty and different types of aleatoric uncertainty are investigated. The selected architectures include sampling by dropout, Bayesian neural networks, and deep ensembles. Moreover, to distinguish between in-distribution and OOD data in the different scenarios two uncertainty thresholds, one of which is introduced in this paper, are alternatively applied. Our empirical findings offer guidance to practitioners and researchers who have to deploy real-world uncertainty-aware fault diagnosis systems. In particular, they reveal that, in the presence of epistemic uncertainty, all DL models are capable of effectively detecting, on average, a substantial portion of OOD data across all the scenarios. However, deep ensemble models show superior performance, independently of the uncertainty threshold used for discrimination. In the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, the noise level plays an important role. Specifically, low noise levels hinder the models' ability to effectively detect OOD data. Even in this case, however, deep ensemble models exhibit a milder degradation in performance, dominating the others. These achievements, combined with their shorter inference time, make deep ensemble architectures the preferred choice.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

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

Optimal Ansatz-free Hamiltonian Learning In Situ

arXiv:2606.19486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing the features of a Hamiltonian that governs a quantum system serves as a fundamental subroutine of quantum device calibration, signal sensing, and error correction. Recent works proposed protocols have achieved the optimal Heisenberg-limited scaling learning ansatz-free Hamiltonians from their real-time evolutions without fully specifying interaction structures. However, these protocols rely on both deep circuits with interleaving probes and control, and extremely short time resolution, making them difficult to implement on near- and intermediate-term in situ quantum experiments. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient, control-free, and ancilla-free algorithm that uses only Pauli product state preparation and measurement, and learns an ansatz-free Hamiltonian $H$ with $||H||\leq\Lambda$ in total evolution time of $\Theta(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. The evolution time cost of our algorithm is optimal for any control-free protocols as we further prove a lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. Technically, our method introduces a randomized-sampling framework that combines band-limited kernel-based time sampling with a displacement sieve for Hamiltonian structure learning. The characteristic probe time resolution depends only on $\Lambda$ instead of $\varepsilon$, which makes our protocol especially appealing in the high-precision regime for sensing and calibration applications. We also show that the algorithm maintains the same asymptotic total evolution time in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise when the Hamiltonian is local after calibration. Our results demonstrate the fundamental cost of experimentally friendly Hamiltonian learning and provide a practical route to rigorous in situ characterization of near-term quantum platforms.

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

Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models

This report of world models distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost human-like cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles from human and machine cognition theory. In moving towards human-like world models we present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions (i.e., memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and metacognition) and identify gaps in existing research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and metacognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions to address these gaps informed by active inference and global workspace theory. We also introduce epistemic world models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied to video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction

We present a survey on 4D generation and reconstruction, a fast-evolving subfield of computer graphics whose developments have been propelled by recent advances in neural fields, geometric and motion deep learning, as well as 3D generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). While our survey is not the first of its kind, we build our coverage of the domain from a unique and distinctive perspective of 4D representations, to model 3D geometry evolving over time while exhibiting motion and interaction. Specifically, instead of offering an exhaustive enumeration of many works, we take a more selective approach by focusing on representative works to highlight both the desirable properties and ensuing challenges of each representation under different computation, application, and data scenarios. The main take-away message we aim to convey to the readers is on how to select and then customize the appropriate 4D representations for their tasks. Organizationally, we separate the 4D representations based on three key pillars: geometry, motion, and interaction. Our discourse will not only encompass the most popular representations of today, such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), but also bring attention to relatively under-explored representations in the 4D context, such as structured models and long-range motions. Throughout our survey, we will reprise the role of large language models (LLMs) and video foundational models (VFMs) in a variety of 4D applications, while steering our discussion towards their current limitations and how they can be addressed. We also provide a dedicated coverage on what 4D datasets are currently available, as well as what is lacking, in driving the subfield forward. Project page:https://mingrui-zhao.github.io/4DRep-GMI/

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Watching a Superconducting Coplanar Waveguide Heat Up with a Single Color Center

arXiv:2606.15398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single color centers in diamond offer a local probe of their cryogenic environment, providing a direct way to quantify heating in spin-control hardware. Here, we establish a single spectrally stable tin-vacancy (SnV) center as an on-chip thermometer for a diamond membrane and use it to characterize microwave- and radio-frequency-induced heating in a superconducting coplanar waveguide patterned on the same chip. We first calibrate the temperature dependence of the optical C-transition frequency and linewidth from $20\,\mathrm{K}$ down to the few-kelvin regime. At lower temperatures, where the optical response becomes weakly temperature dependent, we use the spin-lattice relaxation time $T_1$ as a complementary thermometer and tune its sensitivity with the transverse magnetic-field component. Applying this local thermometer to a niobium coplanar waveguide, we observe magnetic-field-dependent superconducting breakdown under GHz drive, accompanied by abrupt heating of the diamond. In contrast, at $20\,\mathrm{MHz}$ and $400\,\mathrm{mT}$, relevant for nuclear-spin control, we detect no measurable heating up to the breakdown threshold of $9.4\,\mathrm{dBm}$, corresponding to $B_\mathrm{ac}\sim1.2\,\mathrm{mT}$. These results define a safe operating window for superconducting microwave and RF control structures in diamond-based quantum nodes.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Current Observation: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Controllable Non-Markov Games

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

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

Influence-Guided Concolic Testing of Transformer Robustness

arXiv:2509.23806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concolic testing for neural networks alternates concrete execution with constraint solving to search for inputs that flip model decisions. We present a concolic tester for Transformer classifiers that uses SHAP estimates to rank pending path predicates by their impact on the current prediction. To support self-attention with multiple heads in execution backed by SMT solving, we implement attention semantics in pure Python that are compatible with the solver and make the softmax boundary explicit by concretizing exponentiation arguments. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 across three compact Transformer classifiers, ResNet18, and VGG16 under a one-pixel budget and a 900s horizon. Across the 500 model–input pairs in this matched comparison, our method achieves 60% success, compared with 15% for a differential evolution baseline that treats the model as a black box. In the primary two-layer Transformer branch-ordering study, SHAP-based predicate prioritization raises success from 56% to 60% and reduces median attack time by 51%. These results show that influence-guided path exploration can make concolic testing a practical way to find adversarial examples in Transformer models.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

A Machine Learning Pipeline for Scalable Annotation of Patient-Ventilator Dyssynchrony from Bedside Ventilator Data

Objective: Patient-ventilator dyssynchrony (PVD) is a common and clinically consequential problem in critically ill patients receiving invasive mechanical ventilation. Yet automated identification of PVD subtypes at scale remains an unmet clinical need, owing to the lack of large annotated bedside waveform datasets. Methods: We developed and validated a semi-supervised algorithm for automated annotation of PVD. In two medical ICUs at a tertiary academic center, bedside devices continuously collected airway flow and pressure waveforms from the ventilators. We developed a software interface with an information retrieval system that grouped similar breaths for expert human review, yielding 1,542,296 labeled breaths across eight categories: 2 labels for breath delivery mode, 5 labels for PVD subtypes, and 1 label denoting a normal breath. Two pulmonary physicians with expertise in ventilator training and education provided the expert reference labels. We trained an initial classification model on a model-derivation set of 771,148 breaths (divided into training and validation) and evaluated it on a hold-out test set of 771,149 breaths A semi-supervised approach was utilized to extend labeling to an additional 12,965,000 unlabeled breaths. Results: The supervised model performed well across all labels, with Macro-F1 scores between 0.96 and 1.00. Semi-supervised learning across 12 rounds expanded the training set from 771,148 to 8,563,995 breaths without significant performance degradation. Conclusion: We developed a practical and scalable system for automated PVD annotation that performed well across all subtypes. This work provides a reproducible foundation for automated PVD labeling to support the development of machine-learning-based clinical decision support systems for identifying patient-level asynchrony.

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

Learning Earthquake Wave Arrival Time Picking from Labels with Inaccuracies

arXiv:2606.15377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inaccurately labeled training data, or "label noise", poses a significant threat to the integrity of supervised machine learning models. This corruption directly degrades performance by teaching the model erroneous mappings between features and labels, which leads to poor generalization and reduced accuracy on properly labeled validation and test data. Current seismological applications mainly rely on large-scale training sets or data augmentation to reduce the label-noise impact, which can be labor-intensive and costly. Here, we introduce a Label Noise-Contrastive Robust Learning (LaNCoR) approach that can effectively handle noisy labels in seismic signal processing tasks, without requiring large-scale training datasets. In this approach, the input waveform feature and label representation distributions are aligned in the feature space to correct mislabeling and reduce its impact on the training process. We present LaNCoR's performance on the task of P-phase arrival-time picking of real microseismic data using two baseline models and training approaches. Our results indicate that LaNCoR can improve performance by up to 28.8% across performance metrics. This approach holds great promise for model training in seismology and geosciences.

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

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

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

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

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

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

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

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.