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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The systole of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds

arXiv:2406.11783v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the systole of a model of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds introduced by Petri and Raimbault, answering a question posed in that same article. These are compact manifolds with boundary constructed by randomly gluing truncated tetrahedra along their faces. We prove that the limit, as the volume tends to infinity, of the expected value of their systole exists and we give a closed formula of it. Moreover, we compute a numerical approximation of this value.

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

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Transforming Shape Schemas with Composable Property-Graph Queries (Extended Version)

arXiv:2606.14309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Property graphs may be constrained by schemas that inform both query engines and human users about the shape of valid data, enforcing a contract between data provider and consumer. Composable property-graph queries transform input graphs into output graphs. Then, the question arises of which schema can be expected after one (or several) transformation steps. We investigate how schema constraints can be inferred given an input schema and a transforming query. Specifically, we propose a reasoning procedure that, given an input schema in ProGS and a query in G-CORE infers an output schema. Since graph updates will happen frequently, our inference procedure does not rely on graph instances, such that the computed output schema applies to all graphs originating from any input graph complying with the input schema. Related work has addressed this problem for SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries, encoding it in Description Logics (DLs) so that the output schema is entailed by axioms inferred from input schema and queries. Property graphs and their queries, however, complicate the matter, as property graphs feature label and property annotations as well as first-class edges. Thus, reification has to be used in one way or another, though available DLs lack the means to encode such features directly. We approach this novel challenge via a family of mappings for i) property graphs reified in RDF, aligned with ii) a mapping from ProGS to SHACL and iii) a mapping from G-CORE to SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries. In this manner, schema inference for property graphs becomes manageable, as we break apart the problem through the extra mapping layer and utilize efficient DL reasoners. We develop the metatheory regarding the soundness of inferred schema constraints and the semantic equivalence of mapped schemas and queries.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse

We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent challenges in cross-topic generalization and neutral class prediction.

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

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

LabOSBench: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents for Scientific Instrument Control

arXiv:2606.16802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current computer-use benchmarks primarily focus on software operation tasks in virtualized systems, whereas scientific instrumentation scenarios require coordinated control over complex interfaces, and feedback-driven parameter adjustment. However, directly evaluating agents on physical high-precision instruments is impractical due to high cost, safety risks, limited accessibility, and difficulty in ensuring reproducible evaluation. This motivates the need for a simulated yet realistic testbed that preserves the operational challenges of scientific instruments while enabling scalable and safe benchmarking. To this end, we introduce LabOSBench, a challenging benchmark for multimodal GUI agents built on a suite of web-based scientific-instrument simulators. Operating directly via a browser, LabOSBench avoids resource-heavy OS virtualization while supporting flexible task configuration and execution-based evaluation. Specifically, LabOSBench constructs 96 subtasks across eight instrument simulators, covering workflows from sample loading, alignment, parameter tuning, and data acquisition to result inspection. We evaluate general-purpose vision-language models, specialized GUI agent models, and advanced agentic frameworks at both subtask and end-to-end levels. Our experiments reveal that while existing agents can complete many structured GUI subtasks, they still struggle with feedback-driven operations and long-horizon workflow execution. Overall, LabOSBench provides a reproducible, low-cost testbed for advancing computer-using agents toward scientific-instrument control.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Calibrated Helstrom geometry on the Bloch ball via Connes spectral distance

arXiv:2606.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the equal-prior Helstrom trace-distance geometry of qubit states is recovered from Connes spectral distance in a finite scalar-qubit-scalar model. The two scalar reference sectors couple isotropically to the qubit block through identity Dirac links, so that the full Bloch ball, including mixed states, inherits its standard chordal trace-distance geometry from the finite spectral metric. The scalar-sector distances serve a distinct calibration role: they determine the individual link lengths, satisfy a Pythagorean consistency relation, and reconstruct the middle-sector scale.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

It's Complicated: On the Design and Evaluation of AI-Powered AAC Interfaces

arXiv:2606.24854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance what people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are able to do with their systems. However, evaluating AI-powered AAC interfaces can be difficult. People are intersectional beings and current evaluation metrics can struggle to capture the multifaceted and nuanced desires people may have for their AAC. We explore the complicated nature of six AAC problem spaces, explore how AI might be used in these spaces, and suggest more robust methods of evaluation that take the intersectional nuances of people into account. We also discuss broader issues that arise across these problem spaces and how they could be addressed using our proposed evaluation methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

11.
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

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

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

BioPIE: A Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset for Experiment Understanding

arXiv:2601.04524v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding biomedical experiments provides a foundation for downstream tasks, e.g., laboratory automation, and facilitates effective cross-disciplinary communication. Two challenges, High Information Density (HID) and Multi-Step Reasoning (MSR), pose unique difficulties for precise experimental understanding. Extracting structured knowledge, e.g., Knowledge Graphs (KGs), is an effective approach to address the HID and MSR. However, existing biomedical datasets for structured knowledge information extraction are limited to a general or coarse-grained level, hindering fine-grained experimental understanding. To address this gap, we introduce Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset (BioPIE), a dataset providing procedure-centric KGs that capture entities, actions, and relations at a scale sufficient for reasoning across biomedical protocols. We evaluate information extraction methods on BioPIE and implement a question answering system leveraging the dataset for validation, demonstrating improved understanding performance on test sets as well as on the HID and MSR question sets.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal Design and Physical Applications of Non-Uniform Cellular Automata on Translationally Invariant Lattices

arXiv:2605.13379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by recent theoretical and experimental advances, hyperbolic lattices have emerged as a paradigmatic setting in which geometry becomes an active organizing principle of quantum systems. Their negative curvature, exponential volume growth, and non-Abelian translation symmetry make them fundamentally distinct from Euclidean lattices and give rise to rich geometry-dependent physics, but also hinder the direct application of well-established analytical and computational approaches originally developed for physical systems defined on Euclidean lattices. To establish a unified framework for geometry-dependent physics on Euclidean and hyperbolic lattices, we develop higher-order non-uniform cellular automata (NUCA) as a local-to-global construction for translationally invariant regular lattices. This construction derives geometry-dependent update rules through a lattice-deforming procedure that embeds hyperbolic lattices into a Euclidean square lattice, thereby encoding hyperbolic geometry while preserving physical locality. It thus provides a systematic route toward quantum and classical physics on hyperbolic lattices. We demonstrate the framework in three applications ranging from quantum many-body physics to non-equilibrium statistical physics. First, on the hyperbolic $\{5,4\}$ lattice, a linear NUCA generates exactly solvable subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) models and spontaneous subsystem symmetry-breaking models. Second, as a quantum generalization, we construct non-uniform Clifford quantum cellular automata (CQCA) for the hyperbolic cluster state. Third, we formulate a probabilistic NUCA for directed percolation (DP) on the hyperbolic lattice.

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

Learning Ego-Centric BEV Representations from a Perspective-Privileged View: Cross-View Supervision for Online HD Map Construction

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations derived from multi-camera input have become a central interface for online high-definition (HD) map construction. However, most approaches rely solely on ego-centric supervision, requiring large-scale scene structure to be inferred from incomplete observations, occlusions, and diminishing information density at long range, where perspective effects and spatial sparsity hinder consistent structural reasoning. We introduce Cross-View Supervision (CVS), a representation learning paradigm that transfers geometric and topological priors from an ego-aligned overhead perspective into camera-based BEV encoders. Rather than adding auxiliary semantic losses, CVS aligns representations in a shared BEV feature space and distills globally consistent structural knowledge from a perspective-privileged teacher into the ego-centric backbone. This supervision enhances structural coherence without modifying the inference architecture or requiring overhead input at test time. Experiments on nuScenes using ego-aligned aerial imagery from the AID4AD cross-view extension demonstrate consistent improvements over StreamMapNet while maintaining identical camera-only inference. CVS yields +3.9mAP in the standard $60\times30\,\mathrm{m}$ region and +9.9mAP in the extended $100\times50\,\mathrm{m}$ setting, corresponding to a 44% relative gain at long range. These results highlight perspective-privileged structural supervision as a promising training principle for improving BEV representation learning in HD map construction.

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

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

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

Intrinsic Computational Functionalism and Simulated Consciousness

arXiv:2606.15348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common objection to artificial or simulated consciousness is that a simulated brain is no more conscious than simulated water is wet. We address this from the perspective of Intrinsic Computational Functionalism (ICF): if consciousness is computationally constituted, it depends not on externally imposed descriptions but on the computational structures a system physically realizes in virtue of its own causal-dynamical organization. In previous work we developed Canonical Functionalism as a mathematically precise special case of this anti-interpretivist program, identifying functional states by their complete future input-output roles under a fixed interface. Here we argue that this input-output construction, though important, is incomplete: as a behavioral boundary case of ICF, it makes lookup tables and unfolded systems that preserve the same boundary behavior canonically equivalent. A consciousness-relevant canonical representation must instead include internal mechanisms, interventions, and joint readouts belonging to the relevant intrinsic organization. We therefore define a mechanism-enriched canonical structure and use it to formulate Intrinsic Causal-Computational Realization (ICCR), a realization relation preserving physical implementation, intrinsic state individuation, transition structure, intervention profiles, and the relevant agent-body-world boundary. The central result is conditional: if conscious properties are invariants of intrinsic causal-computational organization, then any system satisfying ICCR realizes the same consciousness-relevant properties, whether biological, artificial, or simulated. We discuss objections including biological naturalism and integrated information theory. We conclude that to deny consciousness to a simulation, one must identify a consciousness-relevant intrinsic causal-computational structure that the simulation fails to realize.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ATLAS: Active Theory Learning for Automated Science

arXiv:2606.12386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advancing scientific understanding through mechanistic modeling requires posing the right experimental questions to yield maximally informative data. To automate this pursuit within cognitive science, we introduce ATLAS (Active Theory Learning for Automated Science), an active learning framework for the data-driven discovery of interpretable behavioral models. ATLAS iterates between generating mechanistic hypotheses–instantiated as a diverse ensemble of sparse neural networks (Disentangled RNNs)–and designing experiments that optimally distinguish between them. We test this approach on the problem of recovering reinforcement learning agents from their behavior in bandit tasks. ATLAS designs varied sequences of qualitatively novel experiments with temporal structure tailored to underlying agent characteristics. The models trained on these experiments are evaluated against a comprehensive set of metrics for mechanistic modeling that capture behavioral, structural, and computational similarity. ATLAS achieves a 5-10x improvement in sample efficiency across all metrics compared to random experimentation, and its performance is further validated against expert-designed experiments derived from literature. These in silico results showcase ATLAS's potential to accelerate human-interpretable insights in cognitive science and other domains where scientific inquiry relies on discovering mechanistic models.

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

Quantum Routers: A Switching-Fabric Framework for Quantum-Native Forwarding

arXiv:2606.17773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forwarding in quantum networks cannot be realized by directly transposing classical switching fabrics, since the no-cloning theorem and the quantum measurement postulate constrain the direct relay of quantum information while ruling out copy-based buffering and inspection. In this paper, we propose a switching-fabric framework for quantum routers based on multipartite entanglement. Specifically, we formalize the notion of an entanglement-based switching fabric, in which a graph state acts as the forwarding resource and entanglement forwarding is realized through local Pauli measurements. We translate the classical notions of blocking and non-blocking operation into structural conditions for entanglement-based fabrics, by deriving the edge-controlled (EC) design principle for non-blocking operation. We instantiate this principle through a monolithic EC crossbar and a modular Clos-type EC fabric, for which we characterize resource scaling and identify the regime where the modular design becomes more resource-efficient than the monolithic one. Finally, a forwarding-latency analysis establishes a fundamental distinction between matching-oblivious and matching-driven forwarding: the proposed EC fabrics realize all requested input-output entanglement links with constant forwarding depth under sufficient measurement parallelism, whereas matching-driven EPR-based fabrics exhibit latency that scales with the number of requested connections. The proposed framework provides a hardware-agnostic foundation for quantum-router switching fabrics.

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

Beyond Averaging in John Ellipsoid Approximation: High-Accuracy Algorithms in the Leverage-Score Model

arXiv:2606.20082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The John ellipsoid of a symmetric polytope $P=\{\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^d:\|\mathbf{A}\mathbf{x}\|_\infty\le1\}$, $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, is computed by a long line of leverage-score algorithms, from Cohen, Cousins, Lee and Yang (COLT 2019) to its successors [WY24, CLS+25], all reaching a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation in $\Theta(\varepsilon^{-1}\log(n/d))$ iterations. We separate this complexity into three costs the modern line conflates (certification, identification, and accuracy) and locate the historical $\varepsilon^{-1}$ in the first alone. In the equivalent D-optimal-design form $\min_{\mathbf{p}\in\Delta_n}-\log\det(\sum_i p_i\mathbf{a}_i\mathbf{a}_i^\top)$, the leverage-score oracle is exactly the first-order oracle and the $(1+\varepsilon)$-John guarantee the Frank-Wolfe gap $g(\mathbf{p})\le\varepsilon d$; through this dictionary the costs come apart. The $\varepsilon^{-1}$ is a certification artifact: the uniform average of the iterates, the certificate used throughout the line, has gap exactly $\Theta(1/T)$, however cheap each iteration is made. Pointed instead at the last iterate the same oracle is fast: a warm-started accelerated method reaches the guarantee in $C(\mathbf{A})+O(\sqrt{\kappa}\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries after an $\varepsilon$-independent setup $C(\mathbf{A})$, and once the optimal face is identified the facial problem is an unconstrained self-concordant minimization whose Hessian the oracle recovers exactly, so damped Newton needs only $O(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ steps, for a total of $C(\mathbf{A})+O(d^2\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ queries. The accuracy dependence is thus doubly logarithmic after an $\varepsilon$-independent, condition-dependent setup; the open problem is the remaining identification cost (a condition-free bound on reaching the optimal face) and lower bounds. Accuracy is not the obstruction.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Sequence-Based Therapeutic Peptide Classification with Augmented Negative Sampling

Therapeutic peptides offer high target specificity, low toxicity, and the ability to modulate protein-protein interactions, yet experimental functional characterization remains costly and slow. Computational prediction of therapeutic function directly from sequence could accelerate peptide screening and enable generative design pipelines, but requires reliable discrimination between therapeutic and non-therapeutic peptides. Existing multi-label predictors cover few functions, rely on limited datasets, and exhibit high glspl{fpr}, limiting their practical utility. We present a lightweight CNN classifier trained on the most comprehensive therapeutic peptide database to date (54,655 peptides, 48 functional categories). A key contribution is a statistically motivated negative sampling strategy using Markov models to generate diverse synthetic decoys at multiple difficulty levels. When evaluated on this controlled decoy benchmark, the FRP is reduced from over 60% for previous models to 2.1% for our approach. Our fine-tuned five-model ensemble achieves 78.9% Micro F1 and 54.6% Macro F1 while requiring only amino acid sequences as inputs. Analysis using a sparse L1-constrained variant of our model shows that convolutional filters capture conserved functional motifs and statistically improbable non-therapeutic patterns, with downstream layers combining these signals, providing mechanistic evidence that the network learns biologically meaningful structure. In a generalization task on the TPpred-LE benchmark, our model achieves 55.3% Micro F1 and 38.6% Macro F1, comparable to TPpred-LE trained on its native dataset (57.9%/38.1%) while predicting four times more therapeutic functions with four times fewer parameters. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/terra-quantum-public/tq-therapep-ai.