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

DynaDebate: Breaking Homogeneity in Multi-Agent Debate with Dynamic Path Generation

arXiv:2601.05746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which excel at collaborative decision-making and complex problem-solving. Researchers have further investigated Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) frameworks, which enhance the reasoning and collaboration capabilities of MAS through information exchange and debate among multiple agents. However, existing approaches often rely on unguided initialization, causing agents to adopt identical reasoning paths that lead to the same errors. As a result, effective debate among agents is hindered, and the final outcome frequently degenerates into simple majority voting. To solve the above problem, we introduce Dynamic Multi-Agent Debate (DynaDebate), which enhances the effectiveness of multi-agent debate through three key mechanisms: (1) Dynamic Path Generation and Allocation, which employs a dedicated Path Generation Agent to generate diverse and logical solution paths with adaptive redundancy; (2) Process-Centric Debate, which shifts the focus from surface-level outcome voting to rigorous step-by-step logic critique to ensure process correctness; (3) A Trigger-Based Verification Agent, which is activated upon disagreement and uses external tools to objectively resolve deadlocks. Experiments show that DynaDebate achieves superior or highly competitive performance across the majority of benchmarks\footnote{The code is at https://github.com/nwpuLee2021/brianstorm.}.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Beyond Parallel Sampling: Diverse Query Initialization for Agentic Search

arXiv:2606.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling for agentic search typically increases depth (i.e., more turns and tokens per trajectory) or breadth (i.e., more parallel rollouts). Here we focus on breadth scaling, showing that standard parallel sampling yields diminishing returns, tracing this to query redundancy at the first turn. When models issue similar first queries across rollouts, the threads retrieve overlapping evidence, and subsequent turns are conditioned on this shared retrieval. We address this limitation with DivInit, a training-free intervention at the first turn. Rather than sampling k independent first queries, DivInit draws n candidates from a single call, picks k < n diverse seeds, and runs them as parallel trajectories. Across five open-weight models and eight benchmarks, DivInit consistently improves over standard parallel sampling, with average gains of five to seven points on multi-hop QA at matched compute. Code available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/diverse-query-initialization

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Lowest order Carleman linearization for low Reynolds long-term behaviour of fluid flow simulations

arXiv:2605.23380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: It is shown that the lowest (second) order truncation of the Carleman linearization of the fluid equations (C2) recovers the late stage of the evolution, namely the steady-state solution, although to a decreasing degree of accuracy at increasing Reynolds number. This asymptotic property is first proved analytically for the decaying logistic with external forcing and then shown to hold to a significant degree of accuracy also for the more complex case of two-dimensional Kolmogorov-like fluid flow at low Reynolds numbers, below $Re \sim 10$. This time-asymptotic property may open interesting prospects for the quantum simulation of low-Reynolds steady-state fluid flows.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

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

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

07.
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.

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

Logical qubits with erasure conversion using metastable neutral atoms

arXiv:2506.13724v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Implementing large-scale quantum algorithms with practical advantage will require fault-tolerance achieved through quantum error correction, but the associated overhead is prohibitive. This overhead can be reduced by engineering physical qubits with fewer errors, and by shaping the residual errors to be more easily correctable. In this work, we demonstrate quantum error correcting codes and logical qubit circuits in a metastable ytterbium-171 nuclear spin qubit with a noise bias towards erasure errors. These errors can be located separately from any syndrome information diagnosing the error, and we demonstrate adaptive circuit execution based on erasure information. We show that dephasing errors on the qubit during coherent transport can be strongly suppressed, and implement entangling gates that maintain a high fidelity in the presence of gate beam inhomogeneity or pointing errors. Furthermore, we demonstrate logical qubit encoding in the [[4, 2, 2]] code, with error correction during decoding based on mid-circuit erasure measurements despite the fact that the code is too small to correct any Pauli errors. Finally, we demonstrate logical qubit teleportation between multiple code blocks with conditionally selected ancillas based on mid-circuit erasure checks, a key part of leakage-robust error correction schemes using neutral atoms.

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

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Initial-state-dependent dephasing effect in non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models

arXiv:2606.24185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the dynamical evolution of non-Hermitian systems under extra external dissipation is essential. Dephasing, a major realistic dissipation, is conventionally considered detrimental to information processing. However, its impact on non-Hermitian systems remains largely unexplored. Here, we focus on finite-sized non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) lattice models with alternating gain and loss in real space and examine the dynamical evolution of the trace distance under pure dephasing. By tuning system parameters, this model supports phases with either parity-time or anti-parity-time symmetries, enabling us to explore the interplay between dephasing and different non-Hermitian symmetries. While the trace distance exhibits distinct dynamical behaviors across the different phases in the absence of dephasing, its response to dephasing is largely symmetry-independent but instead initial-state dependent. By varying initial states, we observe that increasing the dephasing strength can either merely accelerate the decay of the trace distance or stabilize it. Interestingly, we reveal two kinds of dephasing-induced stabilization that differ in the strong dephasing limit: a partial stabilization, where the trace distance approaches a finite value smaller than its initial value in the long-time limit, and a complete stabilization, where the trace distance remains at its initial value throughout the entire evolution. By analyzing the equation of motion, we attribute the initial-state dependent dephasing effect to the alternating gain and loss in the system and confirm its absence in Hermitian counterparts. Furthermore, in the anti-parity-time symmetry unbroken phase, we identify a continuous suppression-upon increasing the dephasing strength-of the otherwise exponential decay of the trace distance seen in the absence of dephasing.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Controllable image-to-video (I2V) generation transforms a reference image into a coherent video guided by user-specified control signals. While precise control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting is essential for high-fidelity creation, existing methods often treat these factors independently. This overlooks the physical coupling among viewpoint, geometry, and illumination in dynamic scenes, leading to visual inconsistencies such as mismatched shadows and perspective drift under simultaneous changes. We present VidCRAFT3, a unified and flexible I2V framework that explicitly models cross-factor interactions among geometry, motion, and illumination, enabling both independent and joint control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction. Image2Cloud provides explicit 3D geometric priors for accurate camera motion control. ObjMotionNet encodes sparse object trajectories into multi-scale motion features to guide realistic object motion. A Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer integrates lighting direction through lighting cross-attention for consistent relighting. To address the scarcity of jointly annotated data, we construct the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset with accurate per-frame lighting direction annotations, and introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy that enables robust learning without fully joint annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidCRAFT3 achieves state-of-the-art performance in control precision and visual coherence across diverse scenarios.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

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

Token Complexity of Certifying Stochastic-Oracle Reliability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wang[Wang2026] introduced the Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machine (SOTM) framework and defined token complexity as the minimum expected cost of interacting with a stochastic oracle needed to attain a specified solution quality for a task. This paper develops an analogous notion for certifying the reliability of a stochastic oracle on a given domain. Certification token complexity is the minimum expected token cost required, with controlled error probability, to distinguish oracles that meet a target reliability level from those that fall below a lower reliability threshold. We construct an SPRT-based certification SOTM that queries the oracle, computes binary correctness scores, and stops when the accumulated log-likelihood evidence crosses a decision threshold. The SOTM halts almost surely, satisfies the desired two-sided error guarantee over the reliability regions to be certified, and yields an explicit upper bound on certification token complexity in terms of the reliability thresholds, the error bound, and the expected per-turn token cost. We then establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound: even with adaptive queries, every error-bounded certification SOTM must incur the same leading-order expected token cost as the SPRT-based construction as the prescribed error bound tends to zero. Together, these bounds characterize the leading-order certification token complexity in the small-error regime.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Winner Takes It All

arXiv:2606.16885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The winner-takes-all (WTA) process takes place on an arbitrary graph. There is an agent on each vertex of the graph, and active agents at neighboring vertices play games. In each game, a randomly chosen agent wins, while the loser is eliminated from subsequent games. The games are played at random times; each game finishes instantaneously, and the games cease when each active agent has only losers among its neighbors. On the one-dimensional lattice, the fraction of winners in the final state is $e^{-1}$, and we also determine the fractions $w_j$ of winners who won $j=0, 1, 2$ games. For the WTA process on a segment, we determine statistics of the total number of winners (the average, the variance, and all higher cumulants), the probabilities of reaching the final state with the minimum or maximum number of winners, and establish the behavior near the boundaries. For infinite regular trees with vertices of degree $d$, i.e., Bethe lattices with coordination number $d$, the fraction of winners is $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fail under iterative denoising, or requires gradient updates whose backward-pass activations cost tens of GB of extra VRAM and which collapse MDLMs at standard learning rates. We introduce TimeROME-DLM, the first training-free, gradient-free, inference-time knowledge-editing framework for MDLMs. It couples two components: a Temporal Indirect Effect (TIE) causal-tracing protocol that identifies, for each fact, the coordinate whose intervention most strongly drives the object prediction at later denoising steps; and a closed-form, low-rank residual edit memory that aggregates subject keys and target deltas across all forget facts and applies a single ridge-regularised update at that coordinate at every diffusion forward, with sparsification to limit utility spillover. Backbone weights stay frozen; only three hyperparameters (alpha, lambda, q) are tuned on a small validation split. On TOFU forget01 with TOFU-finetuned LLaDA-8B-Base, TimeROME-DLM cuts forget-set log-probability by roughly 83 nats. The same configuration transfers to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, Dream-7B, MMaDA-8B, DiffuLLaMA-7B, and LLaDA-MoE-1.4B. It keeps retain-set log-probability nearly flat (within ~1 nat at the utility-safe operating point) across 50 sequentially inserted facts, delivers a four- to fourteen-fold wall-clock speedup with zero additional VRAM over the strongest converged training-time baseline, and scales sub-linearly to 400 facts. TimeROME-DLM closes the locate-then-edit gap between AR LLMs and MDLMs at a fraction of the computational cost.

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

Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR): Function-Preserving SVD Compression for LLMs

arXiv:2606.19993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Activation- and Influence-Aware Ranks (AIR), an SVD-based LLM compression framework that guides each weight matrix's low-rank approximation with a backward-signal influence metric. Starting from the activation-aware optimum of SVD-LLM(W), AIR runs a single closed-form alternating least squares (ALS) sweep that integrates influence element-wise under a monotone-descent guarantee. AIR is layer-local and composes orthogonally with end-to-end methods: alone it exceeds ACIP, and AIR+LoRA outperforms it further. AIR improves perplexity over SVD-LLM(W) by >18% at

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Training-free Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation via Robust Semantic Representation and Matching

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge learned from source domain to distinct target domains, segmenting unseen target classes with only a few annotated samples. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still rely on training or fine-tuning processes, which incur high computational costs and risk overfitting. We observe that when powerful and general-purpose vision foundation models are incorporated into these methods, their performance shows only marginal improvement or even degrades due to overfitting. To address this, we eliminate trainable parameters and propose a training-free framework to avoid both training overhead and overfitting. Built upon the self-supervised vision encoder DINOv3, our framework addresses cross-domain challenges through three core modules. First, the Semantic-aware Feature Re-fusion (SAFR) module identifies and re-fuses features that emphasize semantic patterns, generating representations with enhanced semantic discriminability. Additionally, the Adaptive Support Enhancement (ASE) module narrows semantic gaps between support and query through robust query information aggregation. Finally, the Hybrid Prototype Matching (HPM) module integrates matching results from diverse prototypes to adapt to varying semantic complexity across domains. Extensive experiments on four target domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in CD-FSS without any training.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Global vs. Local Discrimination of Locally Implementable Multipartite Unitaries

arXiv:2509.10430v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study single-shot distinguishability of locally implementable multipartite unitaries under Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) and global operations. As unitary discrimination depends on both the choice of probing states and the measurements on the evolved states, we classify LOCC and global distinguishability into two categories: adaptive strategies, where probing states are chosen based on measurement outcomes from other subsystems, and restricted strategies, where probing states remain fixed. Our findings uncover three surprising features in the bipartite setting and establish new structural limits for unitary discrimination: (i) Certain pairs of unitaries are globally distinguishable with restricted strategies but indistinguishable under LOCC, even with adaptive strategies. (ii) There exist sets of four unitaries that are distinguishable via LOCC, yet remain globally indistinguishable with restricted strategies. (iii) Some sets of unitaries are globally indistinguishable under adaptive strategies, when probed with separable states, but become distinguishable via LOCC.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Between Social Responsiveness and Sleep Disruption are Modulated by Chronotype in Early Adolescence: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Findings from 10,108 Participants of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Background: Sleep disruption is prevalent in people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism but is not clear whether it occurs as an endophenotype or secondary to other behaviours. The ABCD Study is a population-based longitudinal study that monitors the health, demography and lifestyle of over 11,000 children in the US. In this study we leverage these data to investigate whether traits consistent with autism (social responsiveness) are associated with sleep disruption independent of lifestyle and other behavioural measures. Methods: Autistic traits were assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale at age 11, and sleep disruption and behavioural outcomes were assessed at ages 11 and 13 years using the Sleep Disturbance Scale, and the Child Behaviour Check List, respectively. Demographic, health and lifestyle-related variables were assessed by caregiver questionnaires. Regression models were applied to investigate associations between autistic traits and sleep outcomes. Results: There was a significant cross-sectional association between sleep disturbance and SRS at age 11 years old that was independent of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and anxiety/depression ({beta} = 0.12, 95% CI (0.07, 0.17); p < 0.001), that persisted at age 13, and that was modulated by chronotype, with evening types showing a stronger association. Discussion: Social responsiveness assessed in early adolescence (age 11) were associated with sleep disruption independent of multiple confounding factors and were prospectively associated with sleep disruption at age 13 years. These findings contribute to the evidence that disruption of sleep and circadian timing may have a primary role in the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate autistic traits.

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

Beyond U-Net: A Latent-Representation-Aligned Skip-Free Backbone for Flow-Matching Speech Enhancement

arXiv:2606.24745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models, particularly diffusion and score-based approaches, have recently achieved strong performance in speech enhancement, but their iterative sampling process limits real-time deployment. Flow Matching offers an efficient alternative by transporting noisy speech toward clean speech through an ordinary differential equation with few function evaluations. In this work, we propose a skip-free encoder-decoder backbone for flow-matching speech enhancement, guided by Latent Representation Alignment (LRA). Instead of relying on U-Net skip connections, which may transfer noise-correlated low-level features to the decoder, the proposed model aligns its bottleneck and decoder representations with clean latent features extracted from a frozen Descript Audio Codec encoder-decoder without quantization. This codec-aligned supervision promotes compact clean-speech representations while preserving efficient few-step inference. Experiments on WSJ0-CHiME3 and VoiceBank-DEMAND show improved PESQ and perceptual quality, especially on VoiceBank-DEMAND, using only five function evaluations.

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

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

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.