中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

Authors:
Raglan Maddox↗

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Zishuo Bao↗Qian Wang↗Zeshen Zhang↗Haoqi Zhang↗Bowen Peng↗Ang Li↗Rahul Chalamala↗Yucheng Lu↗

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
Zhenhuan Liu↗Zhenyu Du↗Jens Eisert↗Zhenyu Cai↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Authors:
Gelfman↗Wang↗Campos↗A. I↗Sul↗J.-H↗Li↗Q. S↗Alvarez↗Pounjara↗V. K↗Ali↗…

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training

Authors:
Dian Li↗Zekun Wang↗Yaoru Wang↗Jiahong Yan↗

arXiv:2606.19989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Distributionally Robust Set Representation Learning Under Inference-Time Element Corruption

Authors:
Yankai Chen↗Hanrong Zhang↗Bowei He↗Philip S. Yu↗Xue Liu↗

arXiv:2605.30089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard Set Representation Learning methods typically excel on curated data but often overlook the challenge of inference-time element corruption. This refers to scenarios where deployed models encounter element-level degradations, such as outliers or missing components, that may distort set representation and degrade performance. We propose SW-DRSO, a distributionally robust optimization framework tailored for sets. Rather than minimizing loss solely on observed training data, SW-DRSO optimizes a tractable surrogate of the worst-case expected loss over a family of plausible inference-time variations. We introduce a barycentric adversary that approximates the intractable search over corrupted sets by a differentiable training-time optimization over simplex weights. Extensive experiments across four tasks demonstrate that SW-DRSO effectively enhances robustness against corruption while maintaining high overall performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Authors:
Rafi Ahamed↗Md. Abir Rahman↗Tasnia Tarannum Roza↗Munaia Jannat Easha↗Md. Asif Khan↗Sudeepta Mandal↗

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

Authors:
Md Moman Ul Haque Khan↗Samira Sadaoui↗

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AgenticRec: A Recommendation-Oriented Agentic Framework with Progressive Tool-Integrated Reasoning Optimization

Authors:
Tianyi Li↗Zixuan Wang↗Guidong Lei↗Xiaodong Li↗Hui Li↗

arXiv:2603.21613v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recommender agents built on Large Language Models offer a promising paradigm for personalized recommendation. However, existing agents typically suffer from a misalignment between their tool-integrated reasoning trajectories and recommendation feedback, limiting their ability to distinguish fine-grained user preferences. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticRec, an agentic recommendation framework that formulates recommendation as a tool-integrated reasoning process over a recommendation-oriented tool suite. Built upon this framework, we further develop a dedicated two-stage training paradigm tailored for recommender agents. In the first stage, we introduce Recommendation-Oriented Trajectory Activation, optimize the agentic recommendation ability under implicit feedback. In the second stage, Progressive Preference Refinement further refines the agent through bidirectional preference reasoning over self-bootstrapped hard pairs, progressively sharpening preference boundaries. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AgenticRec. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgenticRec-FB16.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

Authors:
Sunkyu Yu↗Xianji Piao↗Namkyoo Park↗

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

3D Vessel Reconstruction from Sparse-View Dynamic DSA Images via Vessel Probability Guided Attenuation Learning

Authors:
Zhentao Liu↗Huangxuan Zhao↗Wenhui Qin↗Zhenghong Zhou↗Xinggang Wang↗Wenping Wang↗Xiaochun Lai↗Chuansheng Zheng↗Dinggang Shen↗Zhiming Cui↗

Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is one of the gold standards for vascular disease diagnosis. With the help of a contrast agent, time-resolved 2D DSA images deliver comprehensive blood flow information and can be utilized to reconstruct 3D vessel structures for medical assessment. Current commercial DSA systems typically require hundreds of scanning views to perform reconstruction, resulting in substantial radiation exposure. In this study, we propose a neural rendering-based optimization framework tailored for high-quality sparse-view DSA reconstruction to reduce radiation dosage. Our approach, termed vessel probability guided attenuation learning, represents DSA imaging as a complementary weighted combination of static and dynamic attenuation fields, with the weights derived from the time-independent vessel probability field. Functioning as a foreground mask, vessel probability provides proper gradients for both static and dynamic fields adaptive to different scene types. This mechanism enables self-supervised decomposition between static backgrounds and dynamic contrast agent flow, and significantly improves reconstruction quality. Our model is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between synthesized projections and real captured DSA images. We further employ two training strategies to improve reconstruction quality: (1) coarse-to-fine progressive training for better geometry and (2) temporal perturbed rendering loss for temporal consistency. Experimental results have demonstrated high-quality 3D vessel reconstruction and 2D DSA image synthesis.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Comparing Human Gaze and Vision-Language Model Attention in Safety-Relevant Environments

Authors:
Marta Vallejo↗Siwen Wang↗

Human visual attention plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to environments containing potential risks. This study investigates whether large vision-language models can identify the same regions of a scene that attract human attention in safety-relevant environments. Eye-tracking data were collected from ten participants viewing 33 scene images representing environments with varying levels of potential risk using Pupil Invisible wearable glasses. Gaze coordinates were mapped onto stimulus images to generate population-averaged human gaze heatmaps. In parallel, GPT-4o was prompted through the OpenAI Vision Application Programming Interface (API) to generate spatial predictions of visual attention, which were converted into saliency maps for comparison with human gaze patterns. Spatial alignment between human gaze heatmaps and model-generated saliency maps was evaluated using four complementary metrics: Pearson correlation (r = 0.515 +- 0.117), Normalised Scanpath Saliency (NSS = 0.988 +- 0.323), Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL = 1.766 +- 0.844), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve using the Judd formulation (AUC-Judd = 0.806 +- 0.076). A cross-model comparison with Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Claude showed that all models exceeded the AUC-Judd chance baseline of 0.5 and achieved positive NSS scores. Gemini Pro demonstrated the strongest spatial localisation according to three of the four metrics, whereas GPT-4o produced the closest distributional match to human attention as measured by KL divergence. These findings suggest that large vision-language models can identify regions that broadly correspond to where humans direct visual attention in safety-relevant scenes without requiring eye-tracking training data. The results highlight the potential of vision-language models as a scalable tool for approximating human attentional patterns.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Process-Verified Reinforcement Learning for Theorem Proving via Lean

Authors:
Minsu Kim↗Se-Young Yun↗

arXiv:2606.20068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) typically has relied on a single binary verification signal, symbolic proof assistants in formal reasoning offer rich, fine-grained structured feedback. This gap between structured processes and unstructured rewards highlights the importance of feedback that is both dense and sound. In this work, we demonstrate that the Lean proof assistant itself can serve as a symbolic process oracle, supplying both outcome-level and fine-grained tactic-level verified feedback during training. Proof attempts are parsed into tactic sequences, and Lean's elaboration marks both locally sound steps and the earliest failing step, yielding dense, verifier-grounded credit signals rooted in type theory. We incorporate these structured rewards into a GRPO-style reinforcement learning objective with first-error propagation and first-token credit methods that balances outcome- and process-level advantages. Experiments with STP-Lean and DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5 show that tactic-level supervision outperforms outcome-only baselines in most settings, delivering improvements on benchmarks such as MiniF2F and ProofNet. Beyond empirical gains, our study highlights a broader perspective: symbolic proof assistants are not only verifiers at evaluation time, but can also act as process-level reward oracles during training. This opens a path toward reinforcement learning frameworks that combine the scalability of language models with the reliability of symbolic verification for formal reasoning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Does the Question Really Matter? Training-Free Data Selection for Vision-Language SFT

Authors:
Peng Sun↗Yi Yang↗Huawen Shen↗Yi Ban↗Tianfan Fu↗Yanbo Wang↗Yuqiang Li↗

arXiv:2603.09715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is crucial for improving vision-language large models (VLLMs). However, many samples can be solved via linguistic patterns or common-sense shortcuts, without genuine cross-modal reasoning, limiting the effectiveness of multimodal learning. Prior data selection methods often rely on costly proxy model training and focus on difficulty or diversity, failing to capture a sample's true contribution to vision-language joint reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVS, a training-free data selection method based on the insight that, for high-quality multimodal samples, introducing the question should substantially alter the model's assessment of answer validity given an image. CVS leverages a frozen VLLM as an evaluator and measures the discrepancy in answer validity with and without conditioning on the question, enabling the identification of samples that require vision-language joint reasoning while filtering semantic-conflict noise. Experiments on Vision-Flan and The Cauldron show that CVS achieves solid performance across datasets. On Vision-Flan, CVS outperforms full-data training by 3.5% and 4.8% using only 10% and 15% of the data, respectively, and remains robust on the highly heterogeneous Cauldron dataset. Moreover, CVS reduces computational cost by 17.3% and 44.4% compared to COINCIDE and XMAS.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly

Authors:
Yihe Fan↗Changyi Li↗Lichen Xu↗Xudong Pan↗Jiarun Dai↗Hong Geng↗Min Yang↗

arXiv:2605.26195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Authors:
Jeyun Lee↗Junhyoung Lee↗Wonbin Kweon↗Bowen Jin↗Yu Zhang↗Susik Yoon↗Dongha Lee↗Hwanjo Yu↗Jiawei Han↗Seongku Kang↗

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Non-frontal face recognition using GANs and memristor-based classifiers

Authors:
Semih Vazgecen↗Cristian Sestito↗Spyros Stathopoulos↗Themis Prodromakis↗

Face recognition systems have advanced significantly through deep learning techniques, delivering high performance and robustness in complex scenarios. However, these approaches incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their in situ applicability in resource-constrained platforms such as drones, where they can address challenges including non-frontal facial imagery. Memristor-based neuromorphic systems have emerged as a compelling approach for edge AI applications, combining biologically inspired processing with efficient and scalable computation. In this work, we propose a facial recognition framework that addresses non-frontal pose variations by integrating lightweight generative adversarial network (GAN)-based pose frontalisation with memristor-based neuromorphic recognition. The experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of combining adversarial learning with memristive technology, achieving up to 96% identification accuracy. The proposed approach alleviates the computational bottlenecks of conventional AI and offers a scalable, efficient solution for face recognition in dynamic real-world environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

Authors:
Xiwen Huang↗Pierre Pinson↗

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Interference Queueing Networks: A Replica Mean-Field Approach in the Symmetric Setting

Authors:
Philippe Sarotte↗Nahuel Soprano-Loto↗Fran\c{c}ois Baccelli↗

arXiv:2606.13264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a model for evaluating the performance of wireless communication networks beyond the ubiquitous full-buffer assumption, under which every transmitter is always active. The network is represented by N interacting queues arranged on a torus, with homogeneous arrival rate and service rates depending on the activity of neighboring interferers. More precisely, each queue is associated with a transmitter-receiver pair, and its service rate is given by the Shannon capacity, which depends on the corresponding Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). Since interfering transmitters only emit when their queue is non-empty, the SINR and hence the service rate improves when neighboring queues are empty. We derive the stability region of the system, together with approximations of its stationary distribution and its exponential rate of convergence to stationarity. These approximations are obtained via a replica mean-field limit, for which we establish propagation of chaos and long-time behavior results.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

Authors:
Jiyoung Moon↗Yonggi Jo↗Zaeill Kim↗Yong Sup Ihn↗Nam Hun Park↗

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

Authors:
Peter S. Morfe↗Christian Wagner↗

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ismail Geles↗Leonard Bauersfeld↗Markus Wulfmeier↗Davide Scaramuzza↗

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adaptively secure unitary designs with constant non-Clifford cost

Authors:
Lennart Bittel↗Lorenzo Leone↗

arXiv:2510.08129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Randomness is a fundamental resource in quantum information, with crucial applications in cryptography, algorithms, and error correction. A central challenge is to construct unitary $k$-designs that closely approximate Haar-random unitaries while minimizing the costly use of non-Clifford operations. In this work, we present a protocol able to generate unitary $k$-designs on $n$ qubits, secure against any adversarial quantum measurement, with a system-size-independent number of non-Clifford gates. Our construction applies a $k$-design only to a subsystem of size $\Theta(k)$, independent of $n$. This ``seed'' design is then ``diluted'' across the entire $n$-qubit system by sandwiching it between two random Clifford operators. The resulting ensemble forms an $\varepsilon$-approximate unitary $k$-design on $n$ qubits. We prove that this construction achieves full quantum security against adaptive adversaries using only $\tilde{O}(k^2 \log\varepsilon^{-1})$ non-Clifford gates. If one requires security only against polynomial-time adaptive adversaries, the non-Clifford cost decreases to $\tilde{O}(k + \log^{1+c} \varepsilon^{-1})$. This is optimal, since we show that at least $\Omega(k)$ non-Clifford gates are required in this setting. Compared to existing approaches, our method significantly reduces non-Clifford overhead while strengthening security guarantees to adaptive security as well as removing artificial assumptions between $n$ and $k$. These results make high-order unitary designs practically attainable in near-term fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets without entanglement in multipartite systems

Authors:
Ziying Hou↗Huaqi Zhou↗Limin Gao↗

arXiv:2606.20380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Genuine nonlocality arises when a set of multipartite orthogonal states is locally indistinguishable under any bipartition of the subsystems. The entanglement-assisted discrimination of such genuinely nonlocal orthogonal product sets has attracted significant attention in quantum information. Based on the criterion of local irreducibility, genuine nonlocality is classified into Type I (reducible) and Type II (irreducible). We present entanglement-assisted discrimination schemes for both types of genuinely nonlocal sets that use minimal resources. For low-dimensional cases, Type I sets require only a single EPR pair, whereas Type II sets necessitate only one GHZ state. We extend these protocols to higher-dimensional systems: the discrimination of Type I sets requires only one maximally entangled state in a two-qutrit system, while that of Type II sets similarly demands a single maximally entangled state in a three-qutrit system. For $n$-partite ($n > 3$) systems, Type I sets continue to require only one maximally entangled state, whereas Type II sets necessitate just one additional EPR pair compared to their Type I counterparts. These results provide a robust framework for the efficient discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets using minimal quantum resources.

Read & Discuss → View Source →