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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Graph neural networks at war: integrating cybersecurity and drone intelligence in the Israeli-Iranian conflict

arXiv:2606.17119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical cyber systems have brought about new threats and challenges in detection and immediate response. This study examines how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be used to aid cybersecurity and drone management in a physical cyber system comprising of cyber intrusions and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By providing a bridge between structural understanding of graphical neural networks, this work has provided an integrated procedure that allows intrusion detection systems to educate on underlying network structures, identify malicious activity, and facilitates drone response measures. Based on an emulation-based case study, cyberattacks models were created to provoke the responses of the drones, which proved that graph-based learning can assist with the situational awareness, swarm coordination, and adaptive maneuver. According to the performance valuation, this method has a detection rate of 94.2, average area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.955 and an average response time of 1.4 seconds. Comparative experiments reveal that proposed GraphSAGE network is more effective than the Graphical Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graphical Attention Networks (GATs) in the identical situation. Such findings prove that graphical neural networks can be used to avert intrusion and response of dynamic cyber-physical systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Investigating Human-Model Discrepancies in Speech Quality Assessment via Acoustic and Prosodic Perturbations

Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear. We investigate this via controlled perturbations on speech: acoustic degradation, prosodic errors, and manipulation of speaker-specific characteristics such as pitch and speaking rate. We obtained MOS predictions for these speech samples from both human listeners and the model, and analyzed the differences in their perceptual characteristics. Results show that most models track acoustic degradation well, while all are insensitive to prosodic errors despite large subjective score drops. For speaker characteristics, models exhibit a double dissociation: strong mean fundamental frequency (F0) biases absent in human ratings, yet insensitivity to speaking rate and F0 variability that humans notice. These findings highlight limitations of scalar MOS prediction beyond acoustic fidelity.

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

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

A soluble bi-specific fusion protein for the improved expansion of human CD8+ CAR-T cells

The success of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is heavily dependent on the quality of the final cellular product. Current expansion protocols often rely on reagents that require removal from cell culture media, posing logistical challenges in manufacturing, and can also lead to terminal differentiation. Here, we evaluate the use of a soluble, bead-free T cell activator, T cell expansion protein (T-CEP), as a streamlined alternative for generating potent CAR-T cells. Human T cells were activated with T-CEP or known T cell activators (Dynabeads and TransAct) and transduced with either CD19 or interleukin-13 (IL-13) mutein (tetravariant-13; TV-13)-based CAR lentiviral vectors. Our results demonstrate that T-CEP supports robust CAR-T cell expansion and achieves transduction efficiencies comparable to commercial reagents for both types of CAR-T cells. Notably, T-CEP significantly favored the expansion of CD8+ T cells, yielding an enhanced CD27+ phenotype and a lower CD4:CD8 ratio compared to TransAct. Cytotoxicity assays confirmed that T-CEP-expanded CAR-T cells possess cytolytic function equivalent to commercial reagents for both CARs, while exhibiting lower levels of inflammatory cytokine secretion. In summary, T-CEP represents a competitive alternative to existing expansion agents, as it does not require its removal during CAR-T manufacturing and generates a CD8+ dominant, less-differentiated phenotype without compromising efficacy.

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

CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs

Structured benchmarks have advanced text-conditional image generation for real-world imagery, however, no such benchmark exists for synthetic radiograph generation. Despite being a highly active area of research, existing studies continue adopting inconsistent evaluation protocols and lack a unified assessment of the three most critical criteria: generative fidelity, privacy risk, and downstream utility. To address these limitations, we introduce CheXGenBench, the first unified evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and downstream utility across frontier text-to-image (T2I) generative models. Our evaluation protocol, comprising over 20 quantitative metrics, covers 11 leading T2I architectures with plug-and-play integration for newer models. Through a rigorous and fair evaluation protocol, we establish comprehensive baseline state-of-the-art (SoTA) performances across all dimensions to guide future research. Furthermore, our results uncover several limitations of current generative models, which include first, even SoTA models struggle with long-tailed medical distributions; second, models pose high privacy risks regardless of fidelity quality; and third, while synthetic data already benefits downstream classification, it is of limited utility for downstream multimodal tasks. Drawing from these results, we propose concrete research directions to advance the field. The code is available at https://github.com/Raman1121/CheXGenBench

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

RaBiT: Residual-Aware Binarization Training for Accurate and Efficient LLMs

arXiv:2602.05367v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires extreme quantization, forcing a critical trade-off between low-bit efficiency and performance. Residual binarization enables hardware-friendly, matmul-free inference by stacking binary ($\pm$1) layers, but is plagued by pathological feature co-adaptation. We identify a key failure mode, which we term inter-path adaptation: during quantization-aware training (QAT), parallel residual binary paths learn redundant features, degrading the error-compensation structure and limiting the expressive capacity of the model. While prior work relies on heuristic workarounds (e.g., path freezing) that constrain the solution space, we propose RaBiT, a novel quantization framework that resolves co-adaptation by algorithmically enforcing a residual hierarchy. Its core mechanism sequentially derives each binary path from a single shared full-precision weight, which ensures that every path corrects the error of the preceding one. This process is stabilized by a robust initialization that prioritizes functional preservation over mere weight approximation. RaBiT redefines the 2-bit accuracy-efficiency frontier: it achieves state-of-the-art performance, rivals even hardware-intensive Vector Quantization (VQ) methods, and delivers a $4.49\times$ inference speed-up over full-precision models on an RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/RaBiT.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training

arXiv:2604.18701v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it admits a tractable per-step surrogate: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this error baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; since the critic only has to learn how hard a transition is to predict, its estimate of the irreducible noise floor converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward zero for stochastic ones, thereby separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this error baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error, visitation-count, and Random Network Distillation methods in training speed and final world model accuracy.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

PatchINR: Patch-Based Implicit Neural Representations for Efficient and Scalable Inference

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) provides an effective approach for continuous signal modeling, but classical per-pixel inference results in quadratic growth in inference count, leading to dramatically increased computational costs in high-resolution application scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a patch-based approach that treats non-overlapping patches as fundamental processing units and predicts entire pixel patches in a single forward pass, significantly reducing the number of inference queries required. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose a hardware acceleration architecture on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform for the INR model, which features a configurable pipeline and supports dual-precision computation. Our patch-based INR achieves comparable reconstruction quality to pixel-level INR (34.97 dB PSNR with 2 x 2 patches) while reducing inference latency by 75% with only 0.6% parameter overhead.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

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

Smarter edits? Post-editing with error highlights and translation suggestions

As MT quality increases, interest in enhanced post-editing features such as QE-derived error highlights is growing, yet evidence for their usefulness remains limited. In this work, we explore the usefulness of LLM-derived error highlights and correction suggestions based on automatic post-editing (APE). We conduct a study where professional translators (En-Nl) post-edit translations using APE error highlights and correction suggestions and compare productivity, quality and user experience to regular PE and PE with QE-derived highlights. While no condition yielded productivity or quality gains compared to regular PE, APE highlights were better received than QE-derived highlights, and correction suggestions improved overall user experience.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

A T-API-Compliant ReAct Agentic Loop for Optical Networks: Generic vs. Domain-Specific Tool Abstractions

arXiv:2606.18000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical networks need intent-driven, closed-loop agentic management, a key enabler for higher autonomy levels. We present the first T-API-compliant reasoning and act (ReAct) loop. We show that domain-specific composite tools achieve 90% oracle-validated correctness with threefold token savings compared to generic tools.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Scalable Graph State Generation with O(1) Local Feedforward in Quantum Networks

arXiv:2606.16375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of quantum networks faces a key challenge: the contradiction between probabilistic long-range entanglement generation and finite coherence time. Existing routing protocols typically focus on global state computation or path optimization. As the network scales up, classical delays accumulate and exacerbate decoherence, leading to a decrease in entanglement fidelity. To reduce routing decision delays to levels far below the coherence time of qubits, we propose a protocol based on local measurement and classical feedforward. This protocol reduces the local decision complexity to amortized O(1) level, ensuring that the decision delay is always much smaller than the coherence time of qubits. We map this protocol onto a dual-species trapped-ion platform and perform hybrid simulations. The results show that the proposed protocol performs well in terms of both resource efficiency and time feasibility. Noise analysis indicates that readout fidelity is the main bottleneck of this protocol, but noise suppression can be achieved by employing an erasure transformation in the dual-species architecture, combined with spatial multiplexing and branch independence, thereby ensuring the generation of high-fidelity star subgraphs. This protocol provides a clear path to achieving high-fidelity star subgraphs. These subgraphs can serve as general modules, merging to construct arbitrary subgraphs, providing a feasible solution for future fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing.

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

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ShapeBench: A Scalable Benchmark and Diagnostic Suite for Standardized Evaluation in Aerodynamic Shape Optimization

arXiv:2605.20763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rapid progress in aerodynamic shape optimization (ASO) has outpaced currently-available standardized evaluation frameworks. Fair comparison requires a unified benchmark spanning diverse shape classes, objective formulations, and matched-budget state-of-the-art baselines. We introduce ShapeBench, an open-source ASO benchmark with a unified API spanning 103 tasks across eight shape categories and multiple optimization regimes. Each ShapeBench task includes a validated surrogate for fast search; when feasible, a high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) pipeline for final verification is available, enabling systematic fidelity-gap analysis. ShapeBench provides a reproducible protocol with well-configured baselines to compare fairly using a consistent budget metric, allowing for comparison among both classical and LLM-driven methods, including general-purpose optimizers and a new domain-specialized evolutionary LLM baseline, ShapeEvolve. Results on ShapeBench demonstrate substantial variance in optimizer rankings across shape categories and problem formulations, with mean pairwise Spearman $\rho = 0.013$, so single-task conclusions do not reliably generalize across problem classes. The benchmark is also far from saturation; classical methods are rarely applicable across all shape categories and tasks, further highlighting the need for more general-purpose approaches.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

JointEdit3D: Feed-Forward 3D Scene Editing in a Unified Latent Space

Existing 3D scene editing methods typically rely on per-scene optimization over explicit 3D representations or cascaded edit-and-reconstruct pipelines, resulting in high test-time cost, limited 3D awareness, and structural inconsistencies. To couple appearance synthesis and geometry prediction during editing, we build on a unified RGB-geometry reconstruction-generation latent space and adapt it to feed-forward 3D scene editing. The resulting framework, JointEdit3D, performs asymmetric latent inpainting by observing only a single edited RGB reference latent and generating the remaining RGB views and edited geometry latent under source-scene anchoring. JointEdit3D introduces a dedicated SceneAnchor Branch to inject source-scene structure without forcing direct copying, and adopts edit/background-aware losses to balance edited-region fidelity with unedited-content preservation. To address the lack of paired resources for standardized 3D scene editing evaluation, we introduce SceneEdit3D-15K, a dataset with 15K paired editing samples and renderer-provided 3D annotations, together with SceneEdit3D-Bench, a curated 100-sample benchmark. Experiments show that JointEdit3D improves edited-region quality and 3D structural completeness over prior baselines while maintaining competitive background preservation.

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

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

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

Are We There Yet? Exploring the Capabilities of MLLMs in Assistive AI Applications

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have redefined visual understanding by combining vision encoders with large-scale language models. This unified architecture enables strong performance on tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and multimodal dialogue, often in zero- and few-shot settings. Their general-purpose capabilities and flexible interfaces make MLLMs a promising foundation for real-world vision-language applications. Assistive AI aims to help users interact with their environments through natural language. These scenarios demand robust visual recognition, contextual reasoning, and multilingual comprehension-capabilities that MLLMs are believed to offer. However, their effectiveness in assistive settings remains to be fully understood. In this work, we explore whether MLLMs can support Assistive AI by evaluating state-of-the-art models on real-world tasks: recognizing everyday objects like currency, answering questions based on scene text, and reading visually presented content across multiple languages. To this end, we developed a system, NetraLink, using a head-mounted GoPro to capture real-world egocentric data, and collected a benchmark covering these assistive scenarios. Our findings provide a comprehensive diagnostic of current MLLMs, highlighting their strengths and limitations in enabling assistive technologies grounded in visual perception and language interaction.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection

Authors:

Performing quantum algorithms for critical problems in physics and chemistry requires substantially lower error rates than the physical error rates of present quantum computers. Achieving such low logical error rates requires quantum error correction1,2 and physical error rates below a critical threshold value3–8. We experimentally demonstrate on a trapped-ion quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD)9,10 improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines, including quantum computation on multiple qubits. Our results hinge on two quantum error correction code constructions optimized for an ion-trap processor: a 12-qubit code encoding two qubits inspired by Knill11 and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four qubits12,13. These constructions are combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection to achieve reduced logical error rates. Our results show that state-of-the-art quantum devices are already able to make use of fault tolerance and error correction to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial quantum circuit computations. Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

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

Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion for Low-Light Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, crowd counting in low-light environments remains largely underexplored, despite its practical importance in the real world. Existing methods mainly focus on well-lit scenes or rely on single-modality Red-Green-Blue (RGB) representations, which often become unreliable under extreme darkness and complex non-uniform illumination. To handle this problem, we construct three new low-light crowd counting benchmarks, which consist of two synthetic datasets, SHA\_Dark and SHB\_Dark, and a real-world benchmark LC-Crowd (Low-light Crowd Dataset). Inspired by Retinex-based physical modeling, we introduce depth and Canny edge cues as complementary geometric and structural priors to enhance the intrinsic reflectance representation under low-light conditions. We propose a Multi-Modal Hyper-Graph Fusion module, which formulates RGB appearance, depth geometry, and edge structure cues as nodes in a unified hyper-graph and explicitly captures their high-order complementary relationships via dynamic hyperedge construction and message passing. Furthermore, to adaptively allocate computation in dense prediction, we propose a Deformable Rectangular Sparse Attention (DRSA) module, which concentrates computation on informative regions through anchor-aware estimation and adaptive rectangular window modeling. Based on these designs, we develop a unified Low-Light Counting Network (LCNet) for robust low-light crowd counting. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best overall performance against existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is in the supplementary material. The datasets will be made public upon acceptance.

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

Density estimation for Hellinger via minimum-distance estimators: mixtures of Gaussians, log-concave, and more

arXiv:2606.11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of density estimation, where we hope to accurately estimate a probability density from $n$ samples. A textbook method for density estimation in total variation distance is the minimum-distance estimator approach, where we conclude both the algorithm and the analysis merely from bounding the VC dimension of a particular concept class (the so-called Yatracos class). While this technique has originally yielded sharp guarantees primarily for total variation distance, in this work we extend the minimum-distance estimator approach for learning within Hellinger distance. Our main observation is that we may produce an analogous recipe for Hellinger (where we only require bounding the VC dimension of a related concept class) by drawing connections to recent results yielding reverse data processing inequalities. This recipe is flexible enough to accommodate fast algorithms originally designed for total variation distance; by modifying the approach of Acharya et al. (2017) we conclude the first near-linear time algorithm for learning classes including univariate mixtures of log-concave densities and mixtures of Gaussians (with arbitrary variances), with near-optimal sample complexity.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dynamic Rollout Editing for Reducing Overthinking in RL-Trained Reasoning Models

Long-form chain-of-thought reasoning can improve LLM performance on complex tasks, but models often continue generating unnecessary reasoning after a correct answer has emerged. We refer to this behavior as overthinking. We study this phenomenon from the perspective of GRPO-style reinforcement learning (RL) post-training, framing it as a training-time credit-assignment problem rather than merely a decoding-time stopping problem. In rollouts sampled at the onset of GRPO training, we observe that successful trajectories can exhibit a slightly higher degree of overthinking than unsuccessful trajectories for the same prompts. This early imbalance provides a starting point for an undesirable feedback loop: because GRPO assigns sequence-level credit, it cannot distinguish the solution-reaching prefix from the unnecessary continuation that lengthens a successful trajectory. Both receive positive update signal, allowing the initial imbalance to grow into more severe overthinking during training. To address this issue, we introduce Dynamic Rollout Editing (DRE), a training-time intervention for successful trajectories that continue thinking after answer emergence. DRE preserves the accepted verified prefix, edits the remaining thinking, and prefers the edited trajectory within the same RL group, weakening the preference signal for unnecessary thinking without penalizing the reasoning needed to reach the answer. Experiments across diverse tasks show the effectiveness of DRE.

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

On-Chip Quantum Randomness Amplification

arXiv:2606.12173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Randomness amplification, the task of extracting uniform private bits from biased seeds that may be partly known by a malicious third party, is of central importance in cryptography. The highest security in this task is provided by a class of quantum protocols known as device-independent, which however are challenging to integrate into scalable devices. Semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols are a promising alternative that guarantees security under few natural assumptions, such as bounds on the amount of energy used by the devices. Here, we provide the first demonstration of SDI randomness amplification on an integrated silicon photonic chip, achieving a throughput rate of 20 Mbps suitable for practical applications. This rate is achieved through a novel technique for SDI entropy certification, which delivers strictly tighter von Neumann entropy bounds compared to existing methods and remains valid even if the preparation and measurement devices share quantum correlations. Overall, the methods developed in this work enable the integration of SDI technology into portable telecom devices, opening up a new generation of quantum cryptographic hardware.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Hodge Spectral Surrogates for Topology-Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.25194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Topological information is widely used in data analysis, network design, and machine learning, and topological constraints naturally arise when optimizing or generating objects with prescribed homological structure. However, directly controlling Betti numbers and persistent homology is difficult because they are discrete and combinatorial. We propose a differentiable framework for topology-constrained optimization based on Hodge-spectral relaxations of homological constraints and low-pass spectral filters. From soft graphs and soft clique complexes, we construct Hodge-Laplacian-type spectral relaxations that unify graph clique complexes and Vietoris–Rips filtrations of point clouds. In the hard limit, the penalty-regularized ambient operator recovers the ordinary Hodge Laplacian on the active subcomplex, while in the soft regime it serves as a differentiable low-frequency spectral surrogate. Homological information is represented by zero and near-zero modes, and differentiable topological objectives are defined using heat filters, resolvent filters, and polynomial Laplacian moments. For point clouds, we show that the proposed Hodge spectral-filter losses yield more spatially distributed gradients, smoother scale-normalized behavior under persistence-pairing changes, and geometry-aware update directions than persistent-homology-based losses. For graph clique complexes, Laplacian moments control normalized first-Betti-type quantities and can be combined with ordinary graph-feature objectives. We also discuss connections to trace-based normalized Betti-number estimation, polynomial spectral methods, and possible quantum trace estimation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Quantifying Prior Dominance in RAG Systems

Authors:

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Models in external knowledge, yet current evaluations rely on discrete heuristics that suffer from ''epistemic blindness'' - failing to distinguish genuine contextual information extraction from parametric memory recall. To address this, we introduce the Normalized Context Utilization (NCU) metric, leveraging continuous token log-probabilities across zero-shot, oracle, and adversarial conditions to strictly quantify contextual information gain. Evaluating architectures ranging from 1.5B to 72B parameters alongside a proprietary commercial API reveals that for strict factual extraction (without Chain-of-Thought reasoning), traditional scaling laws exhibit extreme diminishing returns: highly efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) match or outperform high-capacity architectures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ``Prior Dominance'' correlates with model scale and proprietary alignments. The evaluated commercial API not only overrode explicit external evidence in nearly half of adversarial conflicts, but also frequently suffered from systemic confidence collapse (Negative Transfer) when its parametric priors were contradicted. Our findings highlight the structural epistemic advantage and superior contextual adherence of SLMs in strict extraction workflows.