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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimal Probe State for Phase Estimation Under Covariant Measurement

Authors:
Qipeng Qian↗Christos N. Gagatsos↗

arXiv:2606.18169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the optimization of input states for phase estimation under covariant measurements. Building on Holevo's framework, which provides the optimal covariant measurement for a fixed input state, we further optimize over the input state itself. For a general even $2\pi$-periodic cost function with non-negative Fourier coefficients, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal input state: Its Fock coefficients are determined, up to arbitrary phases, by the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of a Toeplitz matrix defined by the cost function. This characterization yields an explicit expression for the attainable lower bound of the average cost under optimal covariant measurements and shows that this bound asymptotically approaches zero in the infinite-energy limit. For the specific cost function $W(\theta,\tilde{\theta})=4\sin^2[(\theta-\tilde{\theta})/2]$, we obtain the optimal input state and the corresponding minimum average cost in closed form, demonstrating Heisenberg scaling with respect to the mean photon number.

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02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:
Mengjian Fan↗

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Authors:
Qinlin He↗Zeming Zhuang↗Yongji Wu↗Lan Zhang↗Xiaoyong↗Yuan↗

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

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

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

Authors:
Jiho Choi↗Sang Jun Lee↗

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

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

Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata

Authors:
Daniel Soliman↗

AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable. On real paired CT differing only in reconstruction kernel (NLST B30f vs B80f), kernel alone shifted AI-measured diameter and flipped a Fleischner size category in 5.2% (8 of 155) of nodules at fixed patient and acquisition, while detection confidence was unchanged (Wilcoxon p=0.22). Under controlled LIDC-IDRI perturbations the effects dissociated by axis: the noise axis degraded detection confidence (p=5.9e-32, concentrated in nodules under 6 mm) but not measurement, while the frequency/kernel axis corrupted measurement (p=8.6e-13) but not detection. A 4-feature pixel fingerprint recovered reconstruction identity (patient-level AUC about 0.95 on real CT, 0.995 on a QIBA phantom) where the ConvolutionKernel DICOM tag was uninformative (identical labels across reconstructions). The kernel axis transported across four manufacturers (leave-one-vendor-out AUC 0.94-0.98, matching the within-vendor ceiling). Acquisition state thus maps to distinct AI failure modes, frequency content to measurement reliability and noise to detection sensitivity, and is not recoverable from metadata. Acquisition-aware, input-side validation is the missing layer for the acceptance-testing and drift-monitoring requirements now entering imaging-AI accreditation.

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

Quasilinear Equivalence Checking for Detector Error Models

Authors:
Mathys Rennela↗

arXiv:2606.14677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A Detector Error Model (DEM) is a structured representation of error mechanisms in quantum circuits, which has gained popularity in quantum compilation pipelines for its ability to capture fault-tolerance at a circuit level. It lists error mechanisms as instructions targeting detectors and observables, specifying for each physical fault channel the probability that the fault fires, the detectors it triggers, and the observables it flips. In this paper, we develop an equational theory for DEMs, with its associated categorical semantics. We present a sound, terminating, confluent rewriting system for DEM terms, formulating it as a symmetric monoidal theory (a PROP) over the Giry monad. We prove that every DEM term has a unique normal form, which can be computed efficiently in quasilinear time $O(k|E|\log|E|)$, where $|E|$ is the number of instructions and $k$ bounds the size of a target set. This provides a complete set of invariants (via Tanner graphs) for structural DEM equivalence. We provide the first static decision procedure for DEM equivalence, with rigorous correctness guarantees. It is complete (decides full decoder-equivalence exactly) for non-adaptive quantum error correction (QEC) pipelines, and scales to a sound and applicable decision procedure for partially-adaptive circuits (lattice surgery, distributed QEC, ...) without suffering exponential overhead. We discuss its application to the verification and optimisation of quantum compilers.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Authors:
Yuan Zhang↗Shiqi Zhang↗Yedong Shen↗Shuai Dong↗Jiajun Deng↗Xin Zhang↗Yuxuan Gao↗Jiajia Wu↗Xin Nie↗Zhiyuan Cheng↗Jianmin Ji↗Yanyong Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RIDGECUT: Learning Graph Partitioning with Rings and Wedges

Authors:
Qize Jiang↗Angelo Zangari↗Linsey Pang↗Alice Gatti↗Mahima Aggarwal↗Giovanna Vantini↗Xiaosong Ma↗Weiwei Sun↗Sourav Medya↗Sanjay Chawla↗

arXiv:2505.13986v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs by learning heuristics that generalize across instances. However, effectively incorporating domain knowledge into RL frameworks for graph partitioning remains challenging, as existing approaches typically rely on unconstrained node-level actions that lead to large action spaces and inefficient exploration. In this paper, we propose RidgeCut, an RL framework that constrains the action space to enforce structure-aware partitioning in the Normalized Cut problem. Using transportation networks as a motivating example, we introduce a novel concept that leverages domain knowledge about urban road topology – where natural partitions often take the form of concentric rings and radial wedges. By transforming the graph into linear or circular representations, our method enables the use of transformer-based policies and efficient learning via Proximal Policy Optimization. The resulting partitions from RidgeCut are not only aligned with expected spatial layouts but also achieve lower normalized cuts compared to existing methods. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world traffic graphs demonstrate that RidgeCut consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting strong inductive generalization across graph sizes. Although motivated by road networks, RidgeCut provides a general mechanism for embedding structural priors into RL frameworks for graph partitioning.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

Authors:
Shoupeng Wang↗Jiantao Qiu↗Wuyang Zhang↗Conghui He↗

arXiv:2606.14821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Regarding Maternal Nutrition Counselling Among Frontline Health Workers in Udupi, Karnataka, India: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study

Authors:
Amrutha↗M. S↗Rao↗C. R↗Hebbar↗Vennila↗Maiya↗G. A↗Bhat↗Kotebagilu↗N. P↗Bhagavath↗…

Background Indias maternal nutrition profile is undergoing a dual-direction shift, with persistent undernutrition coexisting alongside rising overweight and micronutrient deficiencies. Despite national efforts through Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Health Mission (NHM), maternal dietary diversity remains suboptimal in India. Frontline health workers (FLWs) play a central role in delivering nutrition counselling; however, gaps remain between knowledge and its translation into practice, highlighting the need to strengthen training, applied competencies, and health system support within primary care settings. Objective To assess knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding maternal nutrition counselling among FLWs and to explore contextual factors influencing counselling delivery. Methods A sequential explanatory mixed-methods study was conducted in Udupi, Karnataka, India. In phase one, 46 FLWs- Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Community Health Officers (CHO), and Primary Health Care Officers (PHCO) completed a validated Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation, and exploratory multiple linear regression. In phase two, one focus group discussion with 21 participants was conducted and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results FLWs demonstrated moderate KAP scores (37.50 {+/-} 5.09), with lower scores observed in dietary diversity knowledge and counselling practices. CHOs and PHCOs had significantly higher knowledge (p < 0.001) and practice scores (p = 0.002) compared to ASHAs, while attitudes were similar across cadres. Knowledge was positively associated with practice ({rho} = 0.389, p = 0.008). Exploratory regression indicated that cadre and knowledge were associated with practice, while attitude was not statistically significant. Qualitative findings suggested that counselling was largely protocol-based and constrained by workload, limited counselling tools, economic barriers, and cultural food practices. Conclusion Despite positive attitudes towards maternal nutrition counselling, frontline health workers demonstrated gaps in knowledge and counselling practices. Mixed-methods findings suggest that counselling delivery is shaped by both provider competencies and health-system constraints, highlighting the need for implementation-focused strategies to strengthen maternal nutrition counselling in routine antenatal care.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

Authors:
Chen Min↗Zheng Ma↗

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

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

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

Authors:
Jonathan Starfeldt↗Maria J. Molina↗Alexander Kerr↗Adam Yang↗Thomas R. H. Holmes↗Christopher R. Hain↗

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Operads for compositional reasoning in LLMs

Authors:
Nathaniel Bottman↗Kyle Richardson↗

Question decomposition, i.e. breaking a complex query into simpler sub-queries whose answers are composed to produce a final answer, is a widely used strategy for improving LLM reasoning, yet it currently lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation. In this paper, we propose operads, mathematical structures that model many-in, one-out operations and compositions thereof, as a natural framework for describing question decomposition. We define the questions operad $Q$, in which operations correspond to question templates and composition corresponds to substitution of sub-answers, and show how QA models can be interpreted as algebras over $Q$. Beyond reframing existing practice, this operadic perspective points toward new methods, in particular a notion of operadic consistency, which measures whether a QA model's answers agree across the partial collapses of a question decomposition tree. Empirical evaluation of operadic consistency is reported in our companion paper (Bottman, Liu, and Richardson, 2026), which finds it strongly correlated with accuracy across twelve LLMs and four multi-hop QA datasets and outperforming standard temperature-based self-consistency baselines. We argue that operads are the natural mathematical home for question decomposition, and that invariants such as operadic consistency open new directions for analyzing and improving the reliability of multi-step reasoning.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning Robust Pair Confidence for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Authors:
Zhuangzhuang Pan↗Ning Dong↗Yingna Su↗Yan Xia↗

Multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) requires reliable pair confidence over candidate pairs. Existing pair scorers commonly use pair-level cross entropy over valid candidates, which treats links mostly independently. This leaves the relative confidence geometry among competing causes under-constrained, allowing gold pairs to stay close to hard negatives or rely on incidental non-gold context. We study this vulnerability as pair-confidence brittleness and propose RPCL (Robust Pair Confidence Learning), a training-only framework for pair-confidence learning. RPCL encourages pair confidence to be both discriminative and stable: gold pairs are separated from row-wise hard negatives through a confidence-difference margin constraint, and clean pair predictions are aligned with predictions from a corrupted view where non-gold contextual utterance representations are partially corrupted. The original clean pair scorer and decoding pipeline are used unchanged at inference time. On ECF, MECAD, and MEC4, RPCL improves the three-seed mean Pair F1 over a matched base model by 2.58 to 2.83 percentage points in the full text-audio-video setting, and improves mean Pair AUPRC on all three datasets. Diagnostic analysis further shows larger gold-negative confidence gaps and lower margin-violation severity. These results suggest that explicitly shaping pair confidence is an effective training strategy for MECPE.

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

XMedFusion: A Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Perception and Reasoning Framework for Autonomous Medical Systems

Authors:
Hamza Riaz↗Arham Haroon↗Maha Baig↗Muhammad Dawood Rizwan↗Muhammad Naseer Bajwa↗Muhammad Moazam Fraz↗

Autonomous medical and robotic systems increasingly rely on intelligent perception and reasoning capabilities to interpret visual data and support clinical decision making. Radiology report generation represents a critical component of such automated diagnostic workflows, yet existing end-to-end multimodal models often suffer from weak visual grounding, resulting in unreliable interpretations and omission of subtle clinical findings. This paper presents XMedFusion, a modular AI framework designed as an intelligent perception and reasoning module for autonomous medical systems. The proposed framework decomposes visual information into coordinated functional components that emulate expert-driven analysis, including a visual perception agent that extracts image-grounded evidence, a knowledge graph construction agent that structures clinically relevant findings, and a retrieval-guided drafting process that ensures a consistent reporting structure. A synthesis agent iteratively integrates visual and structured evidence through reasoning-driven verification to produce reliable and interpretable diagnostic outputs. Experimental evaluation on a public chest radiograph dataset demonstrates significant improvements over baseline vision-language models, achieving gains from 0.0493 to 0.3359 in BLEU-1, 0.0863 to 0.2440 in ROUGE-L, and 0.0829 to 0.1708 in METEOR, along with substantial improvements in semantic evaluation metrics such as Consistency (2.38 to 7.80) and Accuracy (2.34 to 6.93). The results highlight the effectiveness of structured multi-agent perception and reasoning for enhancing robustness, transparency, and automation in intelligent medical imaging systems, enabling integration into autonomous healthcare and robotic diagnostic workflows.

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

Probing PbTe-Pb nanowire devices with radio-frequency reflectometry

Authors:
Xin-Yi Tang↗Lin Li↗Zezhou Xia↗Jierong Huo↗Wenyu Song↗Lining Yang↗Zonglin Li↗Jiaye Xu↗Peilin Li↗Runan Shang↗Qi-Kun Xue↗Ke He↗…

arXiv:2606.04544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report the implementation of radio-frequency (rf) reflectometry on selective-area-grown PbTe-Pb nanowire devices on a CdTe substrate. These nanowires are predicted to host Majorana zero modes. We demonstrate the compatibility of the rf technique, including both resistive and capacitive sensing, with these nanowires. The effect of dielectric loss from the CdTe substrate is quantitatively characterized. Furthermore, the feasibility of rf reflectometry is verified under finite magnetic fields where zero-energy modes can emerge. Our results establish the fast control of PbTe quantum devices, paving the way for their applications in topological quantum computation.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Pengxin Wang↗Lihao Guo↗Yi Xie↗Bo Liu↗Siyang Cao↗Jingdi Chen↗

arXiv:2606.14693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

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

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Authors:
Max Kahl↗Sebastian Stricker↗Lisa Hutschenreiter↗Florian Bernard↗Carsten Rother↗Bogdan Savchynskyy↗

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Authors:
Ziming Liu↗Yifan Yang↗Chengruidong Zhang↗Yiqi Zhang↗Lili Qiu↗Yang You↗Yuqing Yang↗

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

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

OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policies

Authors:
Sarvesh Patil↗Mitsuhiko Nakamoto↗Manan Agarwal↗Shashwat Saxena↗Jesse Zhang↗Giri Anantharaman↗Cleah Winston↗Chaoyi Pan↗Douglas Chen↗Nai-Chieh Huang↗Zeynep Temel↗Oliver Kroemer↗…

arXiv:2605.03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning. This work introduces Off-policy Generative Policy Optimization (OGPO), a sample-efficient algorithm for finetuning GCPs that maintains off-policy critic networks to maximize data reuse and propagate policy gradients through the full generative process of the policy via a modified PPO objective, using critics as the terminal reward. OGPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on manipulation tasks spanning multi-task settings, high-precision insertion, and dexterous control. To our knowledge, it is also the only method that can fine-tune poorly-initialized behavior cloning policies to near full task-success with no expert data in the online replay buffer, and does so with few task-specific hyperparameter tuning. Through extensive empirical investigations, we demonstrate that OGPO drastically outperforms methods alternatives on policy steering and learning residual corrections, and identify the key mechanisms behind its performance. We further introduce practical stabilization tricks, including success-buffer regularization, two-sided conservative advantages, and Q-variance reduction, to mitigate critic over-exploitation across state- and pixel-based settings. Beyond proposing OGPO, we conduct a systematic empirical study of GCP finetuning, identifying the stabilizing mechanisms and failure modes that govern successful off-policy full-policy improvement.

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

Vernier: Probing Representational Misalignment Behind Lexical Gaps in Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Zhenyu Yu↗

Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged. We ask whether this lexical gap reflects information loss in the placeholder view or a misaligned read-out from a representation that still carries answer-relevant content. Vernier uses a paired-view weight update as an instrument and then inspects the mechanism left after the gap closes. In the working regimes, the evidence favours representational misalignment. A variable-name probe becomes more accurate on the placeholder view, and activation patching on Qwen-7B, Qwen-14B, and Llama-3.1-8B shows that the decision-token representation can transfer answer identity between views. The update that realigns the views is counterfactual augmentation over original and placeholder prompts, while the answer-subspace KL mainly sharpens intermediate answer-belief agreement. Success is bounded by model family, scale, and task. CRASS transfer is reliable across Qwen scales and Llama, e-CARE remains weak, and preliminary non-causal rename tasks show a similar qualitative pattern.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

"That's AI Slop, You Bot!" Studying Accusations, Evidence, and Credibility in Online Discourse Towards LLM-Generated Comments

Authors:
Jason Miklian↗John E. Katsos↗

arXiv:2606.12073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI has made fluent prose cheap to produce, breaking the old promise to readers that good writing meant real thinking. How have readers responded, and what can this tell us about changing anti-AI attitudes? We analyzed 25 million comments from Hacker News and Reddit (2023-2026), combining LLM judgment on 7,500 sampled accusations of AI use, sentiment trajectories, speech-act coding of 300 confirmed accusations of AI use, and a matched-control test of accused versus non-accused parent comments. We found that the pejorative-label share of accusations rose more than tenfold on both platforms while a placebo vocabulary of pre-2022 inauthenticity terms (shill, astroturf) did not. This shift reflected a fast-growing trend of branding any suspicious or seemingly inauthentic prose as "AI slop". The slop frame now constitutes 94 percent of pejorative mentions, with the dominant comments shifting in tone from mockery toward gatekeeping and structural protest. The key surprise comes from a matched-control test which found that prose features that statistically distinguish AI from human text do not predict which human text gets accused as AI. The new accusations work as social gatekeeping of perceived authenticity without actually screening for AI. This research extends signaling theory by showing that substitute signals used socially can grow even when inaccurate if the underlying detection problem cannot be solved at the non-expert level. It shows that AI's effects on writing from the reader side are distinct from those on the production (writer) side. Detection technology cannot resolve this dynamic because the social function of accusations is increasingly to perform social gatekeeping and in-group signaling as opposed to identifying AI-generated writing.

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23.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

Authors:
Ruiyi Tian↗

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Context-Driven Incremental Compression for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation

Authors:
Yeongseo Jung↗Jaehyeok Kim↗Eunseo Jung↗Jiachuan Wang↗Yongqi Zhang↗Ka Chun Cheung↗Simon See↗Lei Chen↗

Modern conversational agents condition on an ever-growing dialogue history at each turn, incurring redundant attention and encoding costs that grow with conversation length. Naive truncation or summarization degrades fidelity, while existing context compressors lack cross-turn memory sharing or revision, causing information loss and compounding errors in long dialogues. We revisit the context compression under conversational dynamics and empirically present its fragility. To improve both efficiency and robustness, we introduce Context-Driven Incremental Compression (C-DIC), which treats a conversation as interleaved contextual threads and stores revisable per-thread compression states in a single, compact dialogue memory. At each turn, a lightweight retrieve, revise, and write-back loop shares information across turns and updates stale memories, stabilizing long-horizon behavior. In addition, we adapt truncated backpropagation-through-time (TBPTT) to our multi-turn setting, learning cross-turn dependencies without full-history backpropagation. Extensive experiments on long-form dialogue benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and efficiency of C-DIC; notably, C-DIC shows stable inference latency and perplexity over hundreds of dialogue turns, supporting a scalable path to high-quality dialogue modeling.

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25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency upconversion of infrared signals via molecular cavity optomechanical systems with gain

Authors:
Shu-Xian Quan↗Fen Zou↗Yong Li↗

arXiv:2606.17877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular cavity optomechanical systems have recently emerged as a promising platform for enhancing infrared detection sensitivity, owing to their ability to up-convert low-frequency infrared (IR) photons to visible frequency range. Generally, under red-detuned pumping in such systems, the ideal conversion efficiency of the IR signal approaches 1. To overcome this efficiency constraint, we propose a scheme that incorporates gain into the infrared cavity of a molecular cavity optomechanical system comprising two cavities and an ensemble of N molecules. The upconversion process, which relies on IR absorption and Raman scattering associated with specific vibrational modes, is significantly amplified by the incorporation of gain under the red-detuned conditions. Moreover, our analysis demonstrates that the added noise is maintained near 0.5.

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