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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

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

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies

Generative robot policies typically begin action generation from an observation-independent standard Gaussian distribution, leaving the choice of source distribution underexplored. This work asks a simple question: where should action generation begin? We propose LeaP, a Learnable source Prior that replaces the standard Gaussian with a proprioception-conditioned diagonal Gaussian over action chunks. Parameterized by a lightweight MLP, LeaP jointly predicts the mean and state-adaptive variance of the source distribution, while keeping the downstream generator architecture and inference solver unchanged. This design provides an observation-informed yet stochastic initialization, allowing the generator to focus on precise action refinement rather than transporting samples from an uninformed noise source. On 15 RoboTwin manipulation tasks, LeaP achieves an average success rate of 81.6%, outperforming four representative baselines – including deterministic-source methods, a no-prior counterpart, and a diffusion-bridge policy – by 6.5 to 25.5 percentage points. The same prior consistently improves both flow-matching and diffusion-bridge generators, while using fewer parameters and converging faster. The advantage carries over to real-world deployment, where LeaP attains the best performance. These results suggest that the source distribution is an independent and reusable design axis for generative robot policies, complementary to the choice of generative dynamics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SMEPilot: Characterizing and Optimizing LLM Inference with Scalable Matrix Extensions

arXiv:2606.16332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern CPUs increasingly integrate matrix extensions, such as Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME), that provide high-throughput matrix execution within the CPU. For LLM inference, however, these units are not a universal replacement for conventional CPU cores: prefill, decode, attention, and KV-cache operations expose different arithmetic intensities, vector behavior, and layout requirements, while SME units and CPU cores still compete for shared memory bandwidth. This paper studies this mismatch through a roofline-based characterization of SME-enabled CPUs and uses the resulting model to guide operator-level execution choices. We present SMEPilot, an LLM inference engine that selects CPU-only, SME-only, or cooperative SME+CPU execution for each operator shape. SMEPilot partitions matrix work across SME and CPU cores at tile granularity, overlaps SME-suitable matrix stages with CPU-suitable vector stages in attention, and maintains layout state so packed tensor representations are reused rather than repeatedly rebuilt on critical paths. Across Llama-3.2-3B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30BA3B on phone, PC, and server platforms, SMEPilot improves end-to-end inference performance by up to 3.94$\times$.

06.
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.

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

AIRMap: AI-Generated Radio Maps for Wireless Digital Twins

arXiv:2511.05522v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate, low-latency channel modeling is essential for real-time wireless network simulation and digital-twin applications. Traditional modeling methods like ray tracing are however computationally demanding and unsuited to model dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose AIRMap, a deep-learning framework for ultra-fast radio-map estimation, along with an automated pipeline for creating the largest radio-map dataset to date. AIRMap uses a single-input U-Net autoencoder that processes only a 2D elevation map of terrain and building heights. Trained on 1.2M Boston-area samples and validated across four distinct urban and rural environments with varying terrain and building density, AIRMap predicts path gain with under 4 dB RMSE in 4 ms per inference on an NVIDIA L40S-over 100x faster than GPU-accelerated ray tracing based radio maps. A lightweight calibration using just 20% of field measurements reduces the median error to approximately 5%, significantly outperforming traditional simulators, which exceed 50% error. Integration into the Colosseum emulator and the Sionna SYS platform demonstrate near-zero error in spectral efficiency and block-error rate compared to measurement-based channels. These findings validate AIRMap's potential for scalable, accurate, and real-time radio map estimation in wireless digital twins.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dissociative recombination and ion-pair formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues: A time-dependent wave-packet study including rotational coupling

arXiv:2606.11352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a comprehensive theoretical investigation of dissociative recombination (DR) and resonant ion-pair (RIP) formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues using time-dependent wave-packet propagation methods. Nuclear dynamics are treated on a set of 23 coupled electronic states, including $^2\Sigma$, $^2\Pi$, and $^2\Delta$ symmetries, in both adiabatic and strictly diabatic representations, with rotational couplings explicitly included. Reaction cross sections are computed over collision energies ranging from 0 to 50 eV. The results reveal that inclusion of a large manifold of resonant states and rotational couplings significantly enhances the DR cross section relative to earlier theoretical studies. In the diabatic representation, $^2\Sigma$ states dominate the recombination dynamics, while in the adiabatic representation, $^2\Pi$ and $^2\Delta$ states contribute significantly at low collision energies. For RIP formation, two different diabatization schemes yield systematically larger cross sections than previous models, highlighting the sensitivity of ion-pair production to electronic coupling structure. Isotopic effects are examined, showing a clear inverse dependence of cross section magnitude on reduced mass. The present results underscore the importance of multi-state coupling and nonadiabatic effects in accurately describing electron-molecule collision processes in primordial and astrophysical plasmas.

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

Reward as An Agent for Embodied World Models

arXiv:2606.19990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While RL has become a promising tool for refining world models, existing methods largely rely on conservative rollouts near the training distribution, limiting exploration, behavioral diversity, and richer dynamic discovery. In this work, we challenge this conservative paradigm. We argue that the core limitation is not exploration itself, but the lack of reliable verification strategies to support broader exploration. Without reliable verification, expanded exploration becomes highly susceptible to reward hacking, where policies exploit imperfect rewards without achieving genuine improvement. To evaluate this motivation, we instantiate our method in embodied world models, where physical plausibility, and task completion provide a rigorous testbed for scalable RL under complex dynamics. On the verification side, we introduce Reward as an Agent, an agentic reward framework that actively evaluates generated behaviors to provide robust reward signals and mitigate reward hacking under distribution shifts. On the exploration side, we introduce Dynamic-Aware Rollout Diversification through DynDiff-GRPO, which explicitly expands action-space exploration to diversify trajectories, broaden state-action coverage, and encourage richer embodied behaviors beyond conservative rollout regimes. By unifying Reward as an Agent with DynDiff-GRPO, we enable RL on a more reliable reward foundation with substantially diversified sampling, effectively mitigating reward hacking while yielding significant accuracy gains across multiple open-source world models, thereby demonstrating that broader exploration can scale successfully when grounded in robust verification.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior work has studied the formalization and decision, but not narration, which is the step that turns a formal tool's output into the user answer. To fill the narration gap, we first model the LLM-solver loop as a verified decision procedure. We further evaluate five open-sourced models under prompt injection, and we find certificate gating makes the solver verdict sound, while an adversary can invert a verified conclusion across phrasings and channels. We study the mitigation through hardened prompt that reduces injection significantly but cannot eliminate it and still suffers under adaptive attack. Combining the formal analysis and empirical studies, we show in the LLM-solver loop, robustness does not reach to the answer that the user finally reads.

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

Physics-Aware Auxiliary Losses Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of a GNN Synthesizability Filter

arXiv:2606.12651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning drug-discovery pipelines increasingly rely on generative models that propose molecules far from the data used to train downstream synthesizability filters. Existing filters (SAScore, SCScore, RAscore, DeepSA) are purely statistical and degrade in exactly this out-of-distribution (OOD) regime. We ask whether cheap, closed-form physical priors, used as auxiliary supervision on a graph neural network (GNN), improve OOD generalization. We add two auxiliary losses to a GINE backbone: a topological complexity regression supervised by the Bertz index, and a strain-energy soft penalty supervised by MMFF94 force-field energy. On a 65,177-molecule corpus (HIV, Tox21, COCONUT) labeled by SAScore thresholds we reproduce a strong in-distribution baseline, then evaluate a 4-way ablation (baseline / +complexity / +strain / +both) on a single-source OOD split (train on drug-like HIV+Tox21, test on COCONUT natural products), repeated over 5 seeds with paired bootstrap confidence intervals. All three physics-aware variants give a small but statistically significant OOD improvement over the baseline (mean OOD AUC 0.9774): +complexity Delta = +0.0060 (95% CI [+0.0023, +0.0102]), +strain Delta = +0.0032 ([+0.0008, +0.0052]), +both Delta = +0.0066 ([+0.0038, +0.0093]); every interval excludes zero, and the combination is best. The variants are indistinguishable in-distribution, so the effect is visible only under OOD evaluation. We are explicit that the effects are modest, and we report a cautionary methodological finding: a single-seed version of this experiment produced a qualitatively different (non-monotone) story that did not survive multi-seed evaluation.

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

The Urysohn Machine: A Metric-Topological Model of Computation

Authors:

arXiv:2508.14143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the Urysohn Machine, an effective model of classification-oriented computation in which metric separation, frontier structure, and contraction are explicit parts of the computational state. Its basic object is a Urysohn Triple: a support region, a target partition, and a separating classifier stored in a reusable Metric Library. The topological foundation is a constructive Urysohn Realization theorem for finite simplicial settings. It builds separators from dyadic ladders of nested polyhedral regions and equips their frontiers with a chain-level calculus: frontiers are cycles, and shells between levels have boundaries given by differences of frontiers. This construction yields two related complexity measures: decision-boundary width, the geometric measure of a single classifier's boundary, and Urysohn width, the total frontier mass represented by a library or realization. We prove an Amortized Separation Theorem showing that approximating a boundary of width to accuracy requires a number of simple basis triples proportional to boundary width and inversely proportional to resolution, under explicit boundary-footprint assumptions. We also introduce a contrastive separation operator whose graph-cut functional consistently estimates decision-boundary width from sampled metric data, while its Laplacian spectrum certifies class-component structure and conductance. Finally, we analyze the dynamic Urysohn ladder and prove four guarantees: separability under quotient collapse, stability of committed frontiers, bounded capacity under contraction, and scalability with quotient distance. Together, these results give a metric-topological account of classification complexity, amortized inference, and compositional reuse that preserves classical computability while exposing geometric structure hidden by purely symbolic descriptions.

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

Electronic Band Structure of Silicon Determined via a Variational Adiabatic Eigensolver: Theory and Experiment

arXiv:2606.16604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses the critical challenge of excited-state preparation for semiconductor band structure calculations. We introduce a variational adiabatic eigensolver (VAE) protocol that combines adiabatic evolution with variational optimization to prepare high-fidelity eigenstates on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Applying a momentum-space truncation, we accurately compute the electronic band structure of silicon – an idealized infinite periodic system – using only a modest number of qubits. Our approach employs multi-qubit parameterized circuits and a phase-based loss function, overcoming limitations of conventional methods. These limitations include the circuit-construction difficulty in traditional adiabatic approaches and the reduced accuracy of variational quantum eigensolvers for excited states. Through rigorous numerical simulation and experimental implementation on a superconducting quantum processor, we successfully prepare silicon's valence-band and conduction-band eigenstates. Single-shot readout yields state fidelities exceeding 96%, and the measured energy expectations agree with theoretical band energies within 0.5 eV. Further refinement via single-frequency oscillation fitting reduces the energy deviation to below 0.01 eV. This framework provides a robust and practical pathway for precisely determining electronic structures in quantum materials.

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

GILT: An LLM-Free, Tuning-Free Graph Foundational Model for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2510.04567v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for processing relational data but often struggle to generalize to unseen graphs, giving rise to the development of Graph Foundational Models (GFMs). However, current GFMs are challenged by the extreme heterogeneity of graph data, where each graph can possess a unique feature space, label set, and topology. To address this, two main paradigms have emerged. The first leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), but is fundamentally text-dependent, thus struggles to handle the numerical features in vast graphs. The second pre-trains a structure-based model, but the adaptation to new tasks typically requires a costly, per-graph tuning stage, creating a critical efficiency bottleneck. In this work, we move beyond these limitations and introduce Graph In-context Learning Transformer (GILT), a framework built on an LLM-free and tuning-free architecture. GILT introduces a novel token-based framework for in-context learning (ICL) on graphs, reframing classification tasks spanning node, edge and graph levels in a unified framework. This mechanism is the key to handling heterogeneity, as it is designed to operate on generic numerical features. Further, its ability to understand class semantics dynamically from the context enables tuning-free adaptation. Comprehensive experiments show that GILT achieves stronger few-shot performance with significantly less time than LLM-based or tuning-based baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yiming421/inductnode/.

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

Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products – a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation – across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition.

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

Chronological Blindness: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with CHRONOSIGHT

Human perception of visual scenes is inherently temporal. We instinctively recognise whether a fruit is ripening or rotting, whether construction is progressing or being demolished, and approximately how much time separates two photographs of the same subject. Whether large vision-language models (VLMs) share this competence remains an open and practically important question. We introduce CHRONOSIGHT, a rigorously controlled benchmark evaluating five dimensions of visual temporal reasoning: CHRONORANK (chronological ordering of image sequences), CHRONOLOCATE (ordinal stage localisation from a single image), CHRONODELTA (estimation of time elapsed between two images on a logarithmic scale), CHRONOREVERSE (detection of temporally reversed sequences), and CHRONOODD (identification of a temporal outlier within a set). The benchmark comprises 1{,}000 items across eight process families (biological growth, food transformation, physical weathering, construction, environmental change, human ageing, astronomical phenomena, and urban dynamics) spanning timescales from minutes to millennia. We evaluate eight open-source VLMs (500 M to 19 B parameters) under two prompting regimes and collect human performance baselines. Human performance averages 0.89 across tasks; the best open model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) reaches 0.40 under direct prompting, a gap we term chronological blindness. Lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on 151 examples raises CHRONODELTA accuracy from near-zero to 0.43, transferring zero-shot to related tasks (CHRONOODD: 0.37; CHRONOREVERSE: 0.64)suggesting the bottleneck is partly instruction following rather than visual perception. Benchmark, code, and predictions will be released upon acceptance.

17.
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.

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

Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Reliable pixel-level uncertainty quantification holds the potential to transform clinical workflows by enabling high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring and distinguishing true pathological changes from artifacts. Ideally, these models provide the stability required for critical treatment planning and surgical intervention. However, standard deep learning models often suffer from miscalibration, yielding overconfident predictions that mask underlying vulnerabilities at subtle pathological boundaries. To address this, we propose QUAM-SM, a post-hoc framework using targeted adversarial search to identify "adversarially fragile" pixels. By actively seeking perturbations that expose predictive instability, our method highlights regions where decisions are most vulnerable to being flipped. Importantly, the framework disentangles epistemic uncertainty from aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on two public datasets with multiple expert annotations demonstrate that QUAM-SM outperforms both standard and recent uncertainty estimation approaches in terms of reliability and boundary sensitivity. Code is available at https://github.com/HanaJebril/quam_sm

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

Authors:

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

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

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VHDLSuite: Unified Pipeline for LLM VHDL Generation with Data Synthesis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have shown impressive capabilities in Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation, particularly for Verilog. However, evaluating their performance with other Hardware Description Languages (HDL), especially VHDL, remains limited although its distinct language characteristics, such as stricter semantic rules, introduce evaluation considerations that differ from Verilog. This lack of coverage restricts fully understanding of how well current models generalize across hardware design languages with differing structures and semantics. To address this gap, we introduce VHDLSuite, a benchmark-centered infrastructure for scalable VHDL generation evaluation, integrating automated benchmark synthesis, executable validation, and multi-model diagnostic analysis. First, we propose a data pipeline that automatically converts Verilog designs and their accompanying testbenches into executable VHDL benchmark instances, followed by VUnit/GHDL-based validation to ensure each released task is compilable, runnable, and consistently checkable in the VHDL environment. Second, we introduce VHDLBench, a benchmark with over 200 VHDL problems with complete and validated testbenches across a wide range of complexity levels. Third, we extensively evaluate cutting-edge LLMs and uncover key challenges specific on LLM-aided VHDL generation. Our findings provide important insights and support future work in multi-language hardware design automation.Our data pipeline, benchmark, and evaluation framework will be open-sourced.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical functions

Authors:

arXiv:2602.05821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Statistical functions such as the moment-generating, characteristic, cumulant-generating, and second characteristic functions are standard tools in classical statistics and probability theory. They provide a systematic means to analyze the statistical properties of a system and find applications in diverse fields. While these functions are ubiquitous in classical theory, a quantum counterpart has remained underdeveloped because of the noncommutativity of operators. The absence of such a framework has obscured the connections between statistical quantities and the nonclassical features of quantum mechanics. Here, we construct a framework for quantum statistical functions that addresses these limitations and unifies the languages of quantum statistics. We show that the functions reproduce standard statistical quantities such as expectation values, variance, and covariance upon differentiation. By extending the framework to include pre- and post-selection, we define conditional functions that generate conditional statistical quantities, including the weak value and the weak variance. We further show that multivariable functions, defined with specific operator orderings, correspond to the Kirkwood–Dirac, Margenau–Hill, and Wigner distributions. By generalizing Bochner's theorem within the theory of compactly supported distributions, we obtain a criterion that separates classical statistics from quantum statistics, linking the failure of positive definiteness of the multivariable function to the emergence of quasiprobability. As an application, we import the classical method of moments and generalized method of moments into quantum estimation, introducing quantum estimators that exploit the proposed functions. Our framework reproduces quantum statistical quantities and incorporates the nonclassical features of quasiprobability, providing a basis for further study of quantum statistics.