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

Kairos: A Native World Model Stack for Physical AI

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Noise-Guided Transport for Imitation Learning

arXiv:2509.26294v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider imitation learning in the low-data regime, where only a limited number of expert demonstrations are available. In this setting, methods that rely on large-scale pretraining or high-capacity architectures can be difficult to apply, and efficiency with respect to demonstration data becomes critical. We introduce Noise-Guided Transport (NGT), a lightweight off-policy method that casts imitation as an optimal transport problem solved via adversarial training. NGT requires no pretraining or specialized architectures, incorporates uncertainty estimation by design, and is easy to implement and tune. Despite its simplicity, NGT achieves strong performance on challenging continuous control tasks, including high-dimensional Humanoid tasks, under ultra-low data regimes with as few as 20 transitions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

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

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

GW250114 reveals signatures of post-merger black-hole horizon

Authors:

The horizon of a black hole, the ‘surface of no return’, is characterized by its rotation frequency ΩH and surface gravity κ. A striking signature is that any infalling object appears to orbit at ΩH owing to frame dragging, while its emitted signals decay exponentially at a rate set by κ as a consequence of gravitational redshift. Recent theoretical work1 predicts that gravitational waves from binary black-hole mergers carry direct imprints of the properties of the merger remnant in the form of a ‘direct wave’. This gravitational-wave component oscillates near 2ΩH, reflecting the horizon’s frame dragging, and decays at an increasing rate characterized by κ, with additional screening from the black hole’s spacetime. Here we report observational evidence of a direct wave in GW2501142, with a 90% credible matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of $${15.8}_{-0.5}^{+0.1}$$ ( $${17.1}_{-0.4}^{+0.1}$$ ) in the LIGO Hanford (Livingston) detector. The measured properties are in full agreement with theoretical predictions for a Kerr black hole. These findings establish an observational channel to directly measure frame-dragging effects in black-hole ergospheres and explore (near-)horizon physics in dynamical, strong-gravity regimes. The observation of a direct wave after the merger of two black holes reveals signatures associated with the remnant black-hole horizon, establishing an observational channel to directly measure frame-dragging effects in black-hole ergospheres and probe the horizon surface gravity.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Semidefinite programming for understanding the limitations of Lindblad equations

arXiv:2602.01794v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lindbladian quantum master equations (LEs) are the most popular descriptions for quantum systems weakly coupled to baths. But, recent works have established that in many situations such Markovian descriptions are fundamentally limited: they cannot simultaneously capture populations and coherences even to the leading-order in system-bath couplings. This can cause violation of fundamental properties like thermalization and continuity equations associated with local conservation laws, even when such properties are expected in the actual setting. This begs the question: given a physical situation, how do we know if there exists an LE that describes it to a desired accuracy? Here we show that, for both equilibrium and non-equilibrium steady states (NESS), this question can be succinctly formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), a convex optimization technique. If a solution to the SDP can be found to a desired accuracy, then an LE description is possible for the chosen setting. If not, no LE description is fundamentally attainable, showing that a consistent Markovian treatment is impossible even at weak system-bath coupling for that particular setting. Considering few qubit isotropic XXZ-type models coupled to multiple baths, we find that in most parameter regimes, LE description giving accurate populations and coherences to leading-order is unattainable, leading to rigorous no-go results. However, in some cases, LE description having correct populations but inaccurate coherences, and satisfying local conservation laws, is possible over some of the parameter regimes. Our work highlights the power of semidefinite programming in the analysis of physically consistent LEs, thereby, in understanding the limits of Markovian descriptions at weak system-bath couplings.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

On Pitfalls of $RemOve-And-Retrain$: Data Processing Inequality Perspective

The RemOve-And-Retrain (ROAR) benchmark is widely used to evaluate feature attribution methods, yet its validity remains underexplored from an information-theoretic perspective. We show that model- and data-agnostic post-processing of attribution maps (transformations that, by the data processing inequality, cannot add information about the decision function) can often improve ROAR scores. This means that an improved ROAR ranking is not, by itself, evidence that an attribution map carries more information about the model. We trace this failure mode to a bias toward spatially blurry masks. Experiments on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and CUB-200 show a consistent association between blurriness and ROAR performance, a pattern that also appears in the ROAD variant. We provide guidelines for more cautious removal-based benchmarking, with implications for validating mechanistic understanding of neural network internals.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Subsystem Quantum Error Correction for Noisy Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.19628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction has been successfully applied to enhance the precision of parameter estimation in the presence of noise. Nonetheless, existing methods require a number of noiseless, controllable ancillae and lack efficient encoding and decoding procedures. In this Letter, we demonstrate that subsystem error correction provides a new direction that can substantially simplify the metrological protocol. We derive general conditions under which subsystem stabilizer codes achieve the Heisenberg limit and show that, for broad classes of noise, this can be realized by syndrome-free protocols using at most a single ancilla qubit. Furthermore, we extend this framework to dynamical error correction and show that Floquet codes can protect time-dependent metrological signals in reaching the Heisenberg limit.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

DREAM: Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling

Dense retrieval embedding models are a fundamental component of modern retrieval-based AI systems. Most dense retrievers are trained with contrastive objectives, which require labeled positive and negative document pairs that are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this work, we investigate whether the autoregressive next-token prediction objective of a large language model (LLM) can provide supervision for dense retrieval. The intuition is simple: if a document contains information relevant to a query, conditioning on that document should make the target output easier for the LLM to predict. A key challenge is that the next-token prediction loss is computed inside the LLM, while the retriever is a separate embedding model. To address this challenge, we propose DREAM (Dense Retrieval Embeddings via Autoregressive Modeling), which injects retriever-generated query-document similarity scores into selected attention heads of a frozen LLM. During training, these scores determine how much attention each candidate document receives while the LLM predicts the target output. The resulting prediction loss provides gradients for retriever training through the attention mechanism. We evaluate DREAM on retrieval benchmarks BEIR and RTEB using embedding backbones ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters. DREAM consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model scales. These results demonstrate that DREAM provides a promising approach for training dense retrievers through autoregressive modeling.

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

Recurrent neural networks approximate continuous functions

arXiv:2606.20325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical approximation theorems ask for a new neural network whenever the target accuracy is improved. This paper studies the opposite possibility: can the network be chosen once and for all, and can accuracy be bought only by letting it run longer? We prove that this is possible for every continuous function on [-1,1]. More precisely, each such function is uniformly approximated by the time evolution of a single ReLU recurrent neural network with fixed weights and fixed hidden dimension. The mechanism behind the construction is a new intermediate model, the Turing machine with neural units (TMNU). This model retains the algorithmic freedom needed to implement polynomial approximation schemes, while remaining rigid enough to be simulated by RNNs with explicit bounds on hidden dimension and weight magnitude. The resulting convergence rates reflect the underlying polynomial approximation rates. We complement the construction with minimax lower bounds showing that runtime is not merely a proof artifact, but an unavoidable resource in this fixed-network approximation paradigm.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

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

Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2026

arXiv:2606.15708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Welcome to the ninth edition of the AI Index report. As AI continues to advance rapidly, the question becomes whether the systems built around it can keep up. Governance frameworks, evaluation methods, education systems, and the data infrastructure needed to track AI's impact are struggling to match the pace of the technology itself. That gap between what AI can do and how prepared we are to manage it runs through every chapter of this year's report. New in this edition, the report tracks how AI is being tested more ambitiously across reasoning, safety, and real-world task execution, and why those measurements are increasingly difficult to rely on. It also features new estimates of generative AI's economic value alongside emerging evidence of its labor market effects, an analytical framework on AI sovereignty, and a science chapter developed in collaboration with Schmidt Sciences. For the first time, the report features standalone chapters on AI in science and AI in medicine, reflecting AI's growing impact across these two domains.

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

Multi-View In-Cabin Monitoring System for Public Transport Vehicles

We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Conversational Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Precision Oncology Reveals Context-Specific TGFβ and JAK/STAT Alterations in Pancreatic Cancer

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by extensive molecular complexity, profound stromal remodeling, and limited responsiveness to systemic therapies. Although gemcitabine-based regimens remain widely utilized, the molecular pathways that influence treatment-associated biological variation are incompletely understood. The TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT signaling networks are recognized regulators of tumor progression, immune modulation, and therapeutic resistance; however, their genomic architecture in clinically stratified PDAC populations remains poorly defined. Methods: We employed a conversational artificial intelligence-driven analytical framework to investigate TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathway alterations in a cohort of 184 PDAC patients. Clinical and molecular data were integrated to generate age- and treatment-stratified cohorts, enabling pathway-level and gene-level analyses according to gemcitabine exposure. Findings generated through AI-assisted interrogation were subsequently evaluated using conventional statistical approaches. Results: TGF{beta} pathway alterations were identified in approximately one-quarter to one-third of tumors across clinical subgroups and demonstrated relatively stable frequencies regardless of age at diagnosis or gemcitabine treatment status. Gene-level analyses revealed that pathway disruption was predominantly driven by recurrent alterations in SMAD4, with additional low-frequency events involving TGFBR1 and TGFBR2. Notably, TGFBR2 mutations were significantly more frequent among late-onset PDAC patients receiving gemcitabine compared with untreated late-onset patients (8.8% vs. 1.4%; p = 0.04), suggesting a potential treatment-associated enrichment. In contrast, JAK/STAT pathway alterations were rare throughout the cohort, with only isolated mutations observed in pathway components including JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, STAT1, STAT3, and related regulatory genes. No significant differences in JAK/STAT alteration frequencies were identified according to age or treatment exposure. Conclusions: TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathways exhibit distinct genomic architectures in PDAC. TGF{beta} pathway disruption represents a recurrent feature of disease biology, largely driven by SMAD4 alterations, while TGFBR2 enrichment in gemcitabine-treated late-onset tumors suggests a potential context-specific association worthy of further investigation. Conversely, genomic alterations within the JAK/STAT pathway are uncommon, indicating that pathway activity may be regulated predominantly through non-genomic mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the utility of conversational artificial intelligence agents for rapid, scalable, and clinically contextualized pathway interrogation and support future studies integrating multi-omic data to refine precision medicine strategies in PDAC.

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

Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform

arXiv:2606.20120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories.

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

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

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

ConsistencyPlanner: Real-time Planning with Fast-Sampling Consistency Models

arXiv:2606.11569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed-loop planning in complex, real-world driving scenarios presents a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. While traditional rule-based methods are interpretable, their predefined heuristics lack the adaptability for dynamic traffic environments. Learning-based approaches have shown considerable promise. Conversely, learning-based approaches, despite their promise, struggle to balance the modeling diverse and multimodal driving behaviors and real-time planning, often leading to indecisive or unsafe actions. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Planner, a real-time planning framework with fast-sampling consistency models. Our approach is built upon two key technical contributions. Efficient Multimodal Sampling: We employ fast-sampling consistency models to generate a diverse set of plausible future trajectories. This enables efficient, real-time exploration of multimodal actions, overcoming the computational bottlenecks of previous iterative generative methods. Heterogeneous Feature Fusion: We introduce an attention-enhanced decoder that dynamically integrates heterogeneous input features (including scene feature and action token) into a cohesive representation for robust planning. Extensive evaluation in the Waymax simulator demonstrates superior performance in safety metrics compared to existing methods, with particularly strong results in challenging dynamic scenarios.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SPEAR: A System for Post-Quantization Error-Adaptive Recovery Enabling Efficient Low-Bit LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.11244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by deployment cost. Quantization is a key technique for reducing serving cost, yet even state-of-the-art 4-bit quantizers exhibit a noticeable quality gap from FP16, particularly for smaller models where low-bit serving is most beneficial. We identify a fundamental cause of this gap: quantization error is highly input-dependent and varies substantially across tokens, while existing post-quantization compensation methods are static and apply identical corrections to all inputs. As a result, easy tokens are over-corrected while hard tokens remain under-corrected. We present SPEAR, a system for post-quantization error-adaptive recovery that improves low-bit LLM serving. SPEAR introduces lightweight Error Compensators (ECs) modulated by per-token gates and places them only at the most error-sensitive layers identified through a CKA-guided entropy-aware diagnostic. This focuses a small parameter budget where it is most effective. Efficient deployment of ECs presents several systems challenges, including additional computation, tensor-parallel synchronization caused by input-dependent gating, and latency instability across configurations. SPEAR addresses these issues through adaptive kernel-fusion dispatch, combining an epilogue-integrated peer-reduction kernel with P2P dual-write to fuse the post-EC computation into low-bit GEMMs, and an SLO-constrained EC-aware scheduler for predictable serving performance. Across challenging per-channel quantization settings, SPEAR recovers 56-75% of the perplexity gap between W4 and FP16 while adding less than 1% model memory overhead and maintaining latency comparable to a widely used 4-bit serving deployment.

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

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Collision models for open quantum systems coupled to finite environments

arXiv:2606.14163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a system qubit repeatedly interacting with the same environmental qubit, with a reservoir acting on the environment between collisions via a completely positive, trace-preserving map. We show that complete suppression of system–environment correlations uniquely requires a full environmental reset, recovering a semi group dynamics with a time-independent Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad generator, whereas a partial reset yields a continuous transition between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes governed by a single dimensionless relaxation parameter. For a resonant excitation-exchange interaction, we obtain exact closed-form expressions for the Bloch-vector dynamics for both a generalized depolarizing channel and a generalized amplitude-damping channel acting as the reservoir-induced map. Using the Breuer–Laine–Piilo measure and a Choi-matrix CP-divisibility witness, we identify three distinct dynamical regimes across the parameter space: CP-divisible Markovian dynamics, CP-indivisible but P-divisible dynamics, and non-P-divisible non-Markovian dynamics. The boundaries between these regimes, and the structural differences between uniform and anisotropic environmental relaxation, are characterized numerically.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Positive Conserved Quantities in the Klein-Gordon Equation

Authors:

arXiv:2410.04666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an embedding of the Klein-Gordon equation into a pair of coupled equations that are first-order in time. The existence of such an embedding is based on a positivity property exhibited by the Klein-Gordon equation. These coupled equations provide a more satisfactory reduction of the Klein-Gordon equation to first-order differential equations in time than the Schrodinger equation. Using this embedding, we show that the ``negative probabilities" associated with the Klein-Gordon equation do not need to be resolved by introducing matrices as Dirac did with his eponymous equation. For the case of the massive Klein-Gordon equation, the coupled equations are equivalent to a forward Schrodinger equation in time and a backward Schrodinger equation in time, respectively, corresponding to a particle and its antiparticle. We show that there are two positive integrals that are conserved (constant in time) in the Klein-Gordon equation and thus provide a concrete resolution of the historical puzzle regarding the previously supposed lack of a probabilistic interpretation for the field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation. A significant consequence is that the Schrodinger equation is given a relativistic formulation, which does not require creation and annihilation operators, i.e. quantum fields. Physically, this corresponds to a theory in which the positive and negative energy parts do not directly interact, hence there will be no annihilation events–for example, particle-antiparticle collisions which do not result in photon emission. Thus, one practical consequence of this relativistically consistent theory is a simple explanation for dark matter.