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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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

SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark

Authors:
Hongzhou Dong↗Zili Zhang↗Ziting Wen↗Yiheng Qiang↗Runrong Deng↗Wenle Dong↗Ziwen Jiang↗Xinyang Li↗Rui Lu↗Shuoyao Sun↗Wenyu Wang↗Ziyi Xia↗…

Single-photon LiDAR (SPL) based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensing enables time-resolved photon measurements with extreme sensitivity, offering unique potential for active 3D perception in photon-starved scenarios.However, real-world single photon perception remains fundamentally challenging due to unique measurement noise and complex multi-return transient phenomena, which jointly complicate geometric reconstruction and semantic scene understanding. Despite growing interest in SPAD-based sensing, existing studies are largely limited to simulated data or small-scale controlled captures. As a result, systematic evaluation of real-world single photon perception across depth estimation, multi-view reconstruction, and 3D semantic understanding remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce SP-TransientBench (STB), a real-captured multi-task benchmark for single photon perception. SP-TransientBenc comprises 10 diverse scenes and 10,297 views captured using a solid-state single-photon LiDAR at $256\times192$ resolution. Each view provides full time-of-flight histograms with multi-return behavior,standardized metadata, and calibrated camera poses for multi-view evaluation. We further provide 13-class 3D semantic annotations for selected scenes. By providing dedicated data splits and evaluation protocols for each task, STB enables consistent and reproducible benchmarking of real-world single photon perception across multiple 3D vision problems. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

Authors:
Seunghan Lee↗Jun Seo↗Jaehoon Lee↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗Soonyoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Authors:
Tianyi Xiang↗Mingming He↗Li Ma↗Jing Liao↗

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

From Period Finding to Lattice Sampling: Experimental Insights into Shor's and Regev's Factoring Algorithms

Authors:
Daniela Falc\'o↗Arturo Rodr\'iguez↗Guillermo Rivas↗Ricardo S. Alonso↗

arXiv:2606.17647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms for integer factorization represent one of the most prominent applications of quantum computation, with far-reaching implications for modern cryptography. While Shor's algorithm provides a polynomial-time solution in the ideal quantum model, its practical implementation is severely constrained by the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These constraints have motivated the exploration of alternative factoring algorithms with different structural and resource trade-offs. In this work, we present an experimental study of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm, implemented on real quantum hardware, and compare its behavior with that of Shor's algorithm under analogous conditions. Focusing on the case N = 15, we execute both algorithms on the QMIO quantum computer at the Centro de Supercomputacion de Galicia (CESGA) and contrast the results with one of IBM's open-access quantum computers and ideal simulations. This parallel execution enables a low-level comparison of the two algorithms, highlighting how their respective quantum implementations interact with hardware noise, limited circuit depth, and finite sampling. Our analysis emphasizes the different ways in which Shor's and Regev's algorithms encode arithmetic structure into quantum states through Fourier sampling in one and higher dimensions, respectively, and how these differences manifest in experimental outcomes. Although neither algorithm demonstrates a practical advantage in the small N regime, the results provide insight into their relative robustness and failure modes on contemporary quantum devices. This study illustrates the value of experimental benchmarking of alternative quantum factoring algorithms as a means of understanding the practical implications of algorithmic design choices in the NISQ era.

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

Critique of World Model: A Generative Latent Prediction Architecture for World Modeling

Authors:
Eric Xing↗Mingkai Deng↗Jinyu Hou↗

World Model, the algorithmic simulator of the real-world environment which biological agents experience and act upon, has been an emerging topic in recent years due to the rising need to develop virtual agents with artificial (general) intelligence. There has been much discussion on what a world model really is, how to build it, how to use it, and how to evaluate it. In this essay, starting from the imagination in the famed Sci-Fi classic Dune, and drawing inspiration from the concept of ``hypothetical thinking'' in psychology literature, we argue the primary goal of a world model to be {\it simulating all actionable possibilities of the real world for purposeful reasoning and acting}. We examine the key design dimensions of world modeling: data, representation, architecture, learning objective, and usage, surveying existing approaches and analyzing their tradeoffs. Building on this examination, we propose a new Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture for a general-purpose world model, based on stateful, hierarchical, multi-level, and mixed continuous/discrete representations, and a generative and self-supervised learning framework, with an outlook of a Physical, Agentic, and Nested (PAN) AGI system enabled by such a model.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RECTOR: Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling for Affective and Cognitive Representation Learning

Authors:
Jinhan Liu↗Mahsa Shoaran↗

arXiv:2606.15278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Affective and cognitive disorders manifest as distributed, time-varying brain network dynamics across regions, channels, and time, challenging robust representation learning from EEG/sEEG for clinical diagnosis. We propose RECTOR (Masked Region-Channel-Temporal Modeling), an end-to-end self-supervised framework that unifies joint region-channel-temporal representation learning beyond fixed anatomical priors. At its core, RECTOR-SA is a hierarchical, block-sparse self-attention induced by Adaptive Functional Partitioning that evolves region structures from static anatomical definitions to adaptive functional regions. The self-supervision is driven by Masked Topology and Representation Learning, which jointly optimizes three complementary objectives: Masked Predictive Modeling, Topological Structure Modeling, and Cross-View Consistency. Across diverse benchmarks, RECTOR sets a new state-of-the-art in EEG emotion recognition and sEEG task-engagement classification. Crucially, its strong robustness to missing channels and cross-montage generalization underscores its potential for large-scale pre-training on heterogeneous EEG/sEEG, providing interpretable insights at both region and channel levels.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Quantum Algorithm for Random Number Generation

Authors:
Aastha Kataria↗Devansh Desai↗Ashwini Dalvi↗Sagar Korde↗Abhijeet Pasi↗Irfan N A Siddavatam↗Sudhir Ranjan Jain↗

arXiv:2606.13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a quantum algorithm for random number generation that achieves a provable quadratic speedup over classical Markov chain mixing, building on the Diaconis-Shahshahani Fourier analysis of the top-to-random card shuffle. The algorithm integrates three quantum primitives into a unified mixing circuit: the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), which diagonalizes the Markov transition operator; controlled phase rotations, which encode the shuffle eigenvalue spectrum; and the Grover diffusion operator, which acts as a quantum analogue of the Aldous-Diaconis strong uniform stopping time by reflecting amplitudes about their mean at each iteration. For an n-qubit register, the mixing time is O(\sqrt{n \log n}) iterations. Extending to m qudits of local dimension d reduces this to O(\sqrt{\log_d N}) iterations, where N = d^m, compared to the classical O(n \log n) bound. The qudit formulation further reduces QFT circuit depth from O(\log^2 N) to O(\log_d^2 N) gates per layer by encoding the same N-state space using m = \log_d N subsystems instead of \log_2 N qubits. We validate both variants on IBM superconducting hardware.

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

Optimizing Appliance Scheduling for Solar Energy Management Using Metaheuristic Algorithms

Authors:
Hiba Ahmed↗Alexander E. I. Brownlee↗Jason Adair↗Simon T. Powers↗

arXiv:2606.13407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Renewable energy is essential for meeting future energy demands; however, solar energy generation, which occurs only during daylight hours often does not align with household consumption patterns. Appliances such as cookers, washing machines, and dryers are typically operated according to user preferred schedules rather than solar energy availability, creating a scheduling optimization problem. The objective is to determine optimal appliance start times to maximize renewable energy utilization while minimizing user inconvenience and adhering to system constraints. This paper presents a metaheuristic approach using Iterated Local Search (ILS) and Simulated Annealing (SA) to optimize appliance start times, while considering appliance operating durations, power consumption, inverter limit, battery state of charge constraints, and solar generation forecasts. Unlike most existing work, the scheduling is extended beyond a single day to accommodate unfinished tasks from previous days (spillover), ensuring operational continuity and enabling sequential operation across multiple days. Experimental results show that the sequential multi-day scheduling framework effectively manages system constraints while ensuring user convenience under exclusive solar generation. These findings also open opportunities for future research on multi-objective trade-offs between investment in equipment of various sizes, return on that investment, and user satisfaction.

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

SG2Loc: Sequential Visual Localization on 3D Scene Graphs

Authors:
Nicole Damblon↗Olga Vysotska↗Federico Tombari↗Marc Pollefeys↗Daniel Barath↗

Visual localization in complex indoor environments remains a critical challenge for robotics and AR applications. Sequential localization, where pose estimates are refined over time, is important for autonomous agents. However, traditional methods often require storing extensive image databases or point clouds, leading to significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight approach to sequential visual localization using 3D scene graphs. Our method represents the environment with a compact scene graph, where nodes represent objects (with coarse meshes) and edges encode spatial relationships. For each image in the localization phase, we extract per-patch semantic features, predicting object identities. Localization is performed within a particle filter framework. Each particle, representing a camera pose, projects the coarse object meshes from the scene graph into the image, assigning object identities to patches based on visibility. The similarity of the per-patch features, in the input image, and object features from the scene graph determines the weight of a particle. Subsequent images are incorporated sequentially, refining the pose estimate. By leveraging a compact scene graph and efficient semantic matching, our method significantly reduces storage while maintaining performance on real-world datasets. The code will be available at https://github.com/DmblnNicole/sg2loc.

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

The Algebra of Units: From Buckingham's Pi-grec Theorem to Latent-Variable Learning

Authors:
Mauro Valorani↗

arXiv:2606.16737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineers often measure many quantities-speed, pressure, temperature, length-expressed in different physical units. The Buckingham Pi-grec theorem states that these variables can always be combined into a smaller set of dimensionless numbers whose values fully determine the system's behaviour. Identifying the appropriate dimensionless groups has traditionally required expert knowledge and physical insight. This paper shows that they can instead be discovered automatically from data, without prior knowledge of the governing physics. The key observation is that, after logarithmic transformation, measurements collected under different scalings of the same system lie on a low-dimensional manifold whose geometry is determined by the underlying dimensionless groups. Singular value decomposition (SVD) identifies this manifold directly from data. A subsequent search over integer-exponent combinations recovers candidate dimensionless quantities, while a repeating-variable filter retains only those constructed from the machine's characteristic scales. This procedure recovers familiar engineering groups, including the flow coefficient, head coefficient, and Mach number, while excluding equivalent but less interpretable alternatives. The method is demonstrated on a synthetic compressor dataset containing 16,000 measurements. Starting from raw dimensional variables and no physics input, it recovers the correct dimensionless groups to numerical precision and reproduces the compressor performance map with an error below 0.01%. More broadly, the work reveals a close connection between classical dimensional analysis and modern data-driven learning. Both rely on the same underlying algebraic structure, suggesting new approaches for building physical models that are simultaneously interpretable, scalable, and data-efficient.

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

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Authors:
Sliman Jammal↗Andrei Sharf↗

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Authors:
Tianyi Lin↗Chuanyu Sun↗Jingyi Zhang↗Changxu Wei↗Huanjin Yao↗Shunyu Liu↗Xikun Zhang↗Liu Liu↗Jiaxing Huang↗

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

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

HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers

Authors:
Guozhen Zhang↗Xuerui Qiu↗Yutao Cui↗Tianhui Song↗Changlin Li↗Junzhe Li↗Tao Huang↗Xiao Zhang↗Yang Li↗Jianbing Wu↗Miles Yang↗Zhao Zhong↗…

Holistic visual tokenizers are fundamental to unified multimodal models (UMMs) as they map diverse visual inputs into a unified representation space. In this paper, we present HYDRA-X, the first UMM that unifies image and video tokenization within a single Vision Transformer (ViT). Our design is driven by two core challenges: efficiently injecting spatiotemporal reconstruction capability into a native ViT, and embedding image- and video-level semantic awareness into the latent space. To address the first, comprehensive ablations reveal two key findings: (1) frame-level causal temporal attention suffices for visual reconstruction, whereas full spatiotemporal attention degrades it; and (2) hierarchical temporal compression substantially outperforms single-step alternatives. To tackle the second, we propose a lightweight decompressor that upsamples temporally compressed features under joint image-video teacher supervision, thereby enforcing complementary semantic structures within the compact latent space. Building on this holistic tokenizer, we further propose a principled improvement of the editing pipeline: source-target interaction should occur at the latent level inside the tokenizer rather than at the semantic level inside the LLM, substantially improving editing consistency and accelerating convergence. Instantiated at the 7B dense model, HYDRA-X achieves strong performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks, paving the way for future unified-tokenizer UMMs.

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15.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Mapping and engineering the human cell–cell interactome

Authors:
Dino Di Carlo↗

Efforts to systematically understand how cell interactions tune tissue-level function have motivated transformative advances in single-cell transcriptomics and spatial profiling. Although these technologies can measure molecular states in individual cells and their spatial mapping within tissues, they also reveal that there exists a fundamental knowledge gap of how cells influence each other in context. In this Perspective, we propose an initiative to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome: a functional atlas of how all major human cell types communicate. We highlight how recent innovations can make this vision achievable. As a first moonshot, we propose the ‘Billion Cell×Cell Project’, which systematically characterizes the outcomes of defined cell–cell dyads across diverse cell types and conditions. We envision this multistage initiative will produce progressively deeper insights and unlock additional avenues for therapeutic discovery. We call on the scientific community to join us in building the tools, datasets and models that will decode and rewrite the language of life between cells. Di Carlo and colleagues discuss technologies required to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome and the therapeutic avenues such an atlas could unlock.

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

Hilbert-Geo: Solving Solid Geometric Problems by Neural-Symbolic Reasoning

Authors:
Ruoran Xu↗Haoyu Cheng↗Bin Dong↗Qiufeng Wang↗

Geometric problem solving, as a typical multimodal reasoning problem, has attracted much attention and made great progress recently, however most of works focus on plane geometry while usually fail in solid geometry due to 3D spatial diagrams and complex reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hilbert-Geo, the first unified formal language framework for solid geometry, including an extensive predicate library and a dedicated theorem bank. Based on this framework, we propose a Parse2Reason method containing two steps of first parsing then reasoning. In the parsing step, we utilize conditional description language (CDL), a formalized language composed of predicates specifically designed to construct geometric conditions, to represent both problem description (natural text) and solid diagrams (visual image). In the reasoning step, we leverage those formal CDL and the theorem bank to perform relational inference and algebraic computation, generating strictly correct, verifiable, and human-readable reasoning processes. Notably, our proposed Hilbert-Geo is also applicable to plane geometry. To advance geometric reasoning, we curate two expert-annotated dataset SolidFGeo2k and PlaneFGeo3k, which are furnished with geometric formal language annotations, solutions and answers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 77.3% in SolidFGeo2k and 84.1% in MathVerse-Solid (one small subset in MathVerse dedicated to solid geometry), substantially outperforming leading MLLMs, such as Gemini-2.5-pro (54.2% on SolidFGeo2k) and GPT-5 (62.9% on MathVerse-Solid). In addition, our method achieves the SOTA accuracy 80.2% in PlaneFGeo3k, demonstrating the generality of the Hilbert-Geo in geometric reasoning. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/PremiLab-Math/Hilbert-Geo.

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

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Authors:
Tongxu Luo↗Rongsheng Wang↗Jiaxi Bi↗Chenming Xu↗Zhengyang Tang↗Jianlong Chen↗Juhao Liang↗Ke Ji↗Shuqi Guo↗Yuhao Du↗Fan Bu↗Wenyu Du↗…

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

Authors:
Ayan Sahoo↗Debraj Rakshit↗

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

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

Quantifying Coherence-to-Entanglement Conversion Efficiency under Noisy Operations

Authors:
Asad Ali↗H. Kuniyil↗M. I. Hussain↗M. T. Rahim↗Abdallah Slaoui↗Saif Al-Kuwari↗

arXiv:2606.16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the noise-limited conversion of local quantum coherence into bipartite entanglement in a minimal two-qubit protocol comprising a coherent single-qubit input, an incoherent ancilla, an ideal CNOT operation, and subsequent environmental noise. Employing the $l_1$-norm of coherence and the entanglement negativity as resource quantifiers, we establish an exact closed-form correspondence between local single-qubit input coherence and the two-qubit entanglement generated in the noiseless limit, showing that the output negativity is precisely one half of the initial $l_1$-coherence. We then derive analytic expressions for the surviving entanglement and the associated coherence-to-entanglement conversion efficiency under two representative noise mechanisms: independent phase damping and global two-qubit depolarizing noise. The two channels exhibit qualitatively distinct degradation behavior. Phase damping induces a universal multiplicative suppression of the generated entanglement, yielding a coherence-independent conversion efficiency and no finite-noise entanglement sudden death. In contrast, global depolarization introduces an isotropic mixing contribution that shifts the partial-transpose spectrum, producing coherence-dependent degradation and a finite sudden-death threshold. We show that maximally coherent inputs not only maximize the entanglement generated by the CNOT protocol but also optimize its robustness against depolarizing noise. Direct density-matrix simulations validate the analytic results to numerical precision. These findings provide a compact analytic benchmark for assessing how different noise mechanisms constrain coherence-to-entanglement conversion in elementary quantum-information protocols and near-term quantum devices.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

Authors:
Xin Wang↗Jia-Qi Li↗Zhihai Wang↗Anton Frisk Kockum↗Lei Du↗Tao Liu↗Franco Nori↗

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

On Defining Erasure Harms for NLP

Authors:
Yu Lu Liu↗Arnav Goel↗Jackie Chi Kit Cheung↗Alexandra Olteanu↗Ziang Xiao↗Su Lin Blodgett↗

The deployment of NLP systems has raised concerns about harms they might produce, including representational harms. Recent literature has begun to conceptualize and measure one such harm, the harm of erasure. Nevertheless, the field lacks a clear and cohesive conceptual foundation for identifying and measuring erasure. Existing conceptualizations of erasure are often broad – making it difficult to identify what is needed to establish and measure erasure – or else specific to particular settings – facilitating measurement for those settings but potentially challenging to adapt to other settings. To address this gap, we develop and propose a structured definition of erasure that clarifies what components are necessary for establishing whether erasure has occurred, which practitioners need to explicitly articulate and operationalize in order to measure erasure.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Transformation-driven generation of comparable projection images from multimodal anatomical scenes

Authors:
Dariusz Pojda↗Krzysztof Domino↗Micha{\l} Tarnawski↗Agnieszka Anna Tomaka↗

This work addresses the computational problem of generating reproducible projection-space observations from heterogeneous anatomical scenes whose components may undergo independent spatial transformations. We propose a transformation-driven framework for synthetic projection imaging from multimodal anatomical data and demonstrate it on mandibular-motion scenarios. In contrast to conventional Digitally Reconstructed Radiograph (DRR) approaches primarily designed for registration, projection realism, or rendering efficiency, the proposed formulation treats projection imaging as an observation process operating on an explicitly represented anatomical scene. Independently transformable volumetric and surface-based anatomical objects are embedded within a shared scene representation and propagated directly into projection space through explicit transformations. Projection geometry, acquisition modelling, material interpretation, and image presentation remain explicitly separated, enabling controlled exploration of methodological assumptions while preserving reproducibility and direct comparability between generated projections. Particular emphasis is placed on transformation-driven anatomical scenarios relevant to craniofacial analysis, including mandibular motion and therapeutic repositioning. Using a shared anatomical reference scene composed of CT/CBCT volumes, segmented structures, surface models, and auxiliary anatomical or therapeutic objects, the framework enables generation of directly comparable VirtualRTG projections from multiple anatomical configurations while preserving identical imaging assumptions. Rather than aiming at fully physically faithful radiographic simulation, the proposed approach provides a controllable and reproducible methodological environment for studying anatomy–projection relationships, motion observability, and transformation-aware imaging workflows.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Skill-MAS: Evolving Meta-Skill for Automatic Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Hehai Lin↗Qi Yang↗Chengwei Qin↗

arXiv:2606.18837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based automatic Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) generation has become a crucial frontier for tackling complex tasks. However, existing methods face a dilemma between model capability and experience retention. Inference-time MAS leverages frozen frontier LLMs but repeats identical searches without learning from past experience. Conversely, Training-time MAS internalizes experience via gradient updates but is constrained by the low capability ceiling of smaller models, and is hard to scale to large frontier LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-MAS, a novel third path that decouples experience retention from parametric updates by conceptualizing the high-level orchestration capability as an evolvable Meta-Skill. Skill-MAS refines this architectural knowledge through a closed optimization loop: (1) Multi-Trajectory Rollout samples a behavioral distribution for each task under the current Meta-Skill; and (2) Selective Reflection adaptively selects priority tasks and applies hierarchical contrastive analysis to distill systemic experience into generalizable, strategy-level principles. Extensive experiments across four complex benchmarks and four distinct LLMs demonstrate that Skill-MAS not only achieves remarkable performance gains but also maintains a favorable cost-performance trade-off. Further analysis reveals that the evolved Meta-Skills are highly robust and exhibit strong transferability across unseen tasks and different LLMs.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Electrical Noise Produced by Micron-Sized Particles above a Surface Paul Trap

Authors:
Ben Saarel↗Ozgur Sahin↗Hartmut H\"affner↗Alpha T. N'Diaye↗

arXiv:2606.19585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electric field noise produced by the surface of ion trap electrodes reduces the fidelity of quantum computing operations. Despite decades of investigation its microscopic origins remain unclear. Here, we measure electric field noise at trapping locations along the symmetry axis of a linear surface Paul trap. We find that noise levels vary by three orders-of-magnitude in one 600$\,\mu$m section of the trap. Optical and scanning electron microscope images show micron-sized particles close to the trapping locations with the highest noise levels. We find that modeling the particles as a lossy dielectric with a effective loss tangent $\tan\theta=0.33(0.06)$ describes the magnitude of the noise, as well as its spatial and frequency dependence. Our observations may explain the large variation of reported noise levels in literature.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

Authors:
Yonghyun Kim↗Junwon Lee↗Haiwen Xia↗Yinghao Ma↗Junghyun Koo↗Koichi Saito↗Yuki Mitsufuji↗Chris Donahue↗

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

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