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01.
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 $(2/d)^{d/(d-2)}$.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Probing Quantum States over Spacetime Through Interferometry

arXiv:2507.19258v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Establishing a notion of the quantum state that applies consistently across space and time could be a crucial step toward formulating a relativistic quantum theory. We give an operational meaning to multipartite quantum states over arbitrary regions in spacetime through a causally agnostic measurement, a measurement scheme that can be consistently implemented independently of the causal relation between the regions. We prove that such measurements can always be implemented with interferometry, also known as the scattering circuit technique, wherein the conventional density operator, the recently developed quantum state over time (QSOT), and the process matrix formalisms smoothly merge. This framework allows for a systematic study of mixed states in the temporal setting, which turn out to be crucial for modeling quantum non-Markovianity. Based on this, we demonstrate that two different ensembles of quantum dynamics can be represented by the same QSOT, indicating that they cannot be distinguished through interferometry. Moreover, our formalism reveals a new type of spatiotemporal correlation between two quantum dynamics that originates from synchronized propagation in time under time-reversal symmetry. We show that quantum systems with such correlation can be utilized as a reference frame to distinguish certain dynamics indistinguishable under time-reversal symmetry.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Forecasting Is Not Attribution: Localizing Decoder Bypass in Graph-Based Neural Marketing Mix Models

arXiv:2606.12687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marketing mix models are used to forecast business outcomes and to attribute those outcomes to marketing channels, but these goals are not equivalent. We study a failure mode in graph-based neural MMM called attribution bypass: a high-capacity decoder can obtain low forecasting error through target autoregression, dense communication, co-movement, context, or latent memory while failing to route counterfactual sensitivity through the graph used as the attribution object. We introduce DICE-MMM as a bounded diagnostic and training framework. We do not claim that observational neural MMM identifies causal effects. Instead, DICE separates three questions often conflated in graph-based MMM: graph recovery, forecasting accuracy, and whether the trained decoder's perturbation-induced influence is graph aligned. Stage 1 trains a graph encoder with a restricted graph-mediated decoder. Stage 2 freezes the selected encoder and trains a graph-safe latent decoder whose cross-node communication must pass through the supplied graph. Decoder use is evaluated with CIG, AR-CIG, and graph-swap tests. Across controlled R/d/T swaps and an external multi-graph rawlog stress test, DICE improves stable graph recovery over CausalMMM. The experiments show that forecasting accuracy is not an attribution certificate: in a sparse-target benchmark, no-graph and full-graph decoders achieve MSE@7 around 0.004 while AR-CIG nAUPRC remains near or below zero, whereas an oracle graph reaches 0.807 +/- 0.129 at comparable MSE. Frozen graph-swap localizes the bottleneck: the same DICE-hard-trained decoder moves from nAUPRC -0.044 +/- 0.006 under learned graph inputs to 0.894 +/- 0.027 with the oracle graph. The contribution is a stress test and failure-localization framework showing that low MSE can hide attribution bypass and that the unresolved bottleneck is graph-support selection, not forecasting or decoder capacity.

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

CLARITree: Cholesky and Lookahead Accelerations for Regression with Interpretable Piecewise Linear Trees

arXiv:2606.12840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regression trees are among the most interpretable yet expressive model classes in machine learning. Historically, greedy induction has been the dominant approach for constructing well-performing regression trees. While optimal methods based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound exist, they are computationally prohibitive for general linear regression trees, despite often achieving substantially better performance than greedy approaches. Recent work has shown that specialized lookahead strategies can dramatically improve runtime while maintaining near-optimal performance, primarily in classification settings. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm for near-optimal, sparse, piecewise linear regression trees that combines a lookahead-style search strategy with efficient rank-one Cholesky updates of the Gram matrix. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that our method achieves a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency, predictive accuracy, and sparsity, and scales significantly better than the current state of the art.

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

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RODS: Reward-Driven Online Data Synthesis for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.19047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn tool-use RL is bottlenecked by the rapid depletion of informative samples in static datasets. We observe that the gradient signal in GRPO concentrates on tasks with the highest rollout reward variance, a consequence of the Popoviciu upper bound. Consequently, samples near the agent's capability boundary – where successes and failures are roughly balanced – contribute disproportionately large policy gradients. As training progresses, this boundary continuously shifts, which gradually depletes the pool of informative samples in a static dataset. We propose RODS (Reward-driven Online Data Synthesis) to resolve this depletion. RODS closes the loop between RL training and data generation by repurposing the progress reward variance as a practical, zero-cost boundary detector that requires no extra inference beyond the rollouts already computed for training. It continuously identifies such boundary samples, synthesizes new multi-turn variants matching their structural complexity (e.g., API topology and dependency depth) via a skill-aligned resampling pipeline, and manages a dynamic replay buffer that co-evolves with the policy. Starting from 400 human seeds and maintaining an active training pool of ~800 samples, RODS achieves comparable performance to a 17K-sample offline pipeline while requiring roughly 20x fewer trajectories, and improves over fixed-data RL and environment augmentation in our controlled setting.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DisjunctiveNet: Neural Symbolic Learning via Differentiable Convexified Optimization Layers

arXiv:2605.30456v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many learning tasks in science and engineering are characterized by sparse datasets, which limits the effectiveness of purely data-driven approaches. At the same time, these problems are often accompanied by rich domain knowledge derived from physical laws, operational requirements, and expert heuristics. Such knowledge is frequently expressed as rules involving logical propositions and linear inequalities. Existing neuro-symbolic methods typically enforce these rules approximately through soft penalties, assume input-independent rules when designing specialized architectures, or rely on non-differentiable post-processing at inference time to achieve hard constraint satisfaction. While recent advances in differentiable optimization layers enable end-to-end feasibility enforcement within neural networks, extending these approaches to logical or mixed-integer rules remains challenging due to inherent nonconvexity. In this work, we propose a unified end-to-end framework for enforcing hard, input-dependent mixed integer linear constraints within neural networks. Our approach represents rules as disjunctive constraints and applies hierarchical convex relaxations to obtain convex hull formulations. These relaxations yield tractable linear constraints that can be embedded as differentiable optimization layers while enabling exact rule satisfaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real-world datasets, achieving perfect rule satisfaction and strong predictive performance.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Riemann-Bench: A Benchmark for Moonshot Mathematics

arXiv:2604.06802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent AI systems have achieved gold-medal-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, demonstrating remarkable proficiency at competition-style problem solving. However, competition mathematics represents only a narrow slice of mathematical reasoning: problems are drawn from limited domains, require minimal advanced machinery, and can often reward insightful tricks over deep theoretical knowledge. We introduce Riemann-Bench, a private benchmark of expert-curated problems designed to evaluate AI systems on research-level mathematics that goes far beyond the olympiad frontier. Problems are authored by Ivy League mathematics professors, graduate students, and PhD-holding IMO medalists, and routinely took their authors weeks to solve independently. Each problem undergoes double-blind verification by two independent domain experts who must solve the problem from scratch, and yields a unique, closed-form solution assessed by programmatic verifiers. We evaluate frontier models as unconstrained research agents, with full access to coding tools, search, and open-ended reasoning, using an unbiased statistical estimator computed over 100 independent runs per problem. Our results reveal that all frontier models currently score below 10%, exposing a substantial gap between olympiad-level problem solving and genuine research-level mathematical reasoning. By keeping the benchmark fully private, we ensure that measured performance reflects authentic mathematical capability rather than memorization of training data.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.

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

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

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

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

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

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

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

Giving AI a Headache: Acoustic Adversarial Attacks to Computer Vision Applications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to automate a variety of real-world computer vision (CV) applications, such as autonomous vehicle control, facial recognition, and security cameras. Recent research has shown that acoustic vibration can induce real physical motion in cameras, interfering with their internal stabilization mechanisms. Because the motion falls outside the conditions the stabilization system was designed to handle, the system introduces artifacts into the frame, causing AI-based CV models to misclassify, miss targets, or hallucinate objects. Previous work used ultrasonic frequencies (>20 kHz) to perform short-range attacks, which limits them to short distances due to the attenuation exhibited by high frequencies. In this work, we investigate acoustic attacks using lower frequencies in the audible range (

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

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

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Temporal Planning Framework for Disruption Aware Dynamic Route Optimization in Heterogeneous Railway Systems

arXiv:2606.14582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient route optimization play a vital role in ensuring both safety and punctuality in railway operations. It is very crucial particularly in heterogeneous multi-gauge railway networks with varying train speed, stopping pattern, infrastructure compatibility constraints increase coordination complexity. In single-track systems these challenges are further intensify due to all trains to share the same track and requires frequent track switching.Stochastic disruptions events including blocked tracks, blocked trains, engine failure and speed slowdowns introduces additional unpredictability in operations and deviate the timetable. However, existing studies predominantly focuses on high-level timetabling, omitting operational details such as track switching coordination. As a result leaving decision to human operators, increasing safety risks into railway operations. This study proposes a framework based on temporal planning for dynamic route optimization and disruption management in heterogeneous railway systems. The framework formulates railway operations as a temporal planning problem using PDDL 2.1 with explicitly modeling gauge compatibility constraints and diverse disruption scenarios. It generates conflict-free timestamped operational plans specifying both optimized schedules and executable action sequences. To evaluate the proposed framework, we developed a benchmark problem set with 200 instances using up to 1,000 track points and 120 trains. Two state-of-the-art temporal planners and a plan validator were employed to assessed the framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework effectively generates temporal operational plans for heterogeneous railway systems and handles multi-gauge constraints, disruptions, and reduces dependence on manual decision making.

20.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

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

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Trust-Aware Multi-Agent Traceability: Confidence-Calibrated Knowledge Graphs for Consistent Software Artifact Management

arXiv:2606.17203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a trust-aware coordination framework where a shared knowledge graph serves as both centralized semantic memory and a coordination surface through which agents assess and build upon each other's contributions using calibrated confidence scores. Our approach introduces a two-stage traceability link prediction pipeline combining embedding-based retrieval with LLM-based multi-criteria analysis, a traceability seeding mechanism that enables comparison between derivation-time and validation-time confidence, and a consistency protocol governing pipeline interactions through confidence threshold gating, confidence divergence detection, and conflict resolution. We evaluate on an automotive software engineering case study measuring link prediction calibration, protocol effectiveness, threshold sensitivity, and the impact of traceability seeding. Ablation studies confirm that confidence calibration is essential for effective pipeline coordination.

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

Interaction-Centered Intelligence: Toward an Interaction-Based Theory of Human-AI Co-Creation

arXiv:2606.00807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional artificial intelligence has largely conceptualized intelligence as isolated computation occurring within bounded agents. Across classical AI, machine learning, and many generative systems, the dominant unit of analysis remains the individual model or autonomous system evaluated through outputs, benchmarks, prediction accuracy, or optimization performance. While these approaches have produced major advances, they often under-theorize the role of interaction in the emergence of intelligence, creativity, meaning, and adaptive behavior. This paper proposes interaction as the primary unit of analysis for co-creative AI and interaction-centered intelligence more broadly. Drawing from distributed cognition, embodied cognition, enaction, participatory sense-making, human-computer interaction, and computational creativity, the paper traces a historical progression toward increasingly relational accounts of intelligence. Building upon prior work in Creative Sense-Making, quantified co-creation, and co-creative systems such as the Drawing Apprentice and AI Drawing Partner, it argues that intelligence emerges through evolving interaction dynamics among agents, environments, and socio-technical systems rather than solely through internal computation. The paper introduces Interaction-Centered Intelligence as a framework for understanding human-AI co-creation, collaborative emergence, adaptive participation, and interactional dynamics. Rather than evaluating intelligence solely through generated outputs, the framework emphasizes interaction trajectories, coordination patterns, participatory engagement, adaptive regulation, and interactional drift unfolding through time. Implications for explainable co-creative AI, hybrid intelligence, enactive AI, and future human-AI systems are discussed.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.