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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

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

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

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

Active Inference for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control in Noisy Nonstationary IoT Environments

arXiv:2606.13698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban traffic signal control at IoT-instrumented intersections must remain effective under sensor occlusion, weather attenuation, and nonstationary demand. Conventional controllers degrade under these conditions, and learned policies remain difficult to audit. To address these challenges, we propose an active inference controller for a four-arm signalized intersection that dynamically selects phases by minimizing expected free energy (EFE) over Gaussian beliefs about per-direction congestion levels, yielding a fully traceable decision pipeline. We benchmark the controller in a SUMO traffic simulator against a rule-based heuristic and a deep Q-network (DQN) across four scenarios that progressively increase noise and nonstationarity, spanning sensor occlusion, adverse weather, and stochastic accidents. Across 100 independent random evaluations per scenario, active inference attains the lowest idle times and CO2 emissions in the noisiest scenarios (56,977 s and 29.12 kg vs. 71,741 s and 30.56 kg for DQN). These gains come at a modest cost in bus priority service rate and phase switch frequency.

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

Phonikud: Overcoming Phonetic Underspecification for Hebrew Text-To-Speech

Text-to-speech (TTS) for Modern Hebrew is challenged by the language's orthographic complexity, with existing solutions ignoring underspecified phonetic features such as stress. We present a framework for more phonetically accurate Hebrew TTS with four contributions: (1) Phonikud, an open-source Hebrew grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system that outputs fully-specified International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, designed by augmenting a base diacritizer. (2) The ILSpeech corpus of paired Hebrew audio, text, and expert IPA annotations. (3) A benchmark for the previously unmeasured task of Hebrew G2P conversion. (4) Hebrew audio-to-IPA models capturing previously disregarded phonetic details for automatic TTS evaluation. Our results show that Phonikud more accurately predicts Hebrew phonemes than prior methods, and that small, local TTS models with phonetic input from Phonikud approach large proprietary systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://phonikud.github.io.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Private Approximation of the 2nd-Moment Matrix of Any Subsamplable Input

arXiv:2505.14251v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of differentially private second moment estimation and present a new algorithm that achieve strong privacy-utility trade-offs even for worst-case inputs under subsamplability assumptions on the data. We call an input $(m,\alpha,\beta)$-subsamplable if a random subsample of size $m$ (or larger) preserves w.p $\geq 1-\beta$ the spectral structure of the original second moment matrix up to a multiplicative factor of $1\pm \alpha$. Building upon subsamplability, we give a recursive algorithmic framework similar to Kamath et al 2019, that abides zero-Concentrated Differential Privacy (zCDP) while preserving w.h.p. the accuracy of the second moment estimation upto an arbitrary factor of $(1\pm\gamma)$. We then show how to apply our algorithm to approximate the second moment matrix of a distribution $\mathcal{D}$, even when a noticeable fraction of the input are outliers.

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

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

arXiv:2606.13192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 – surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 – while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SCALE: Self-uncertainty Conditioned Adaptive Looking and Execution for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2602.04208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for general-purpose robotic control, with test-time scaling (TTS) gaining attention to enhance robustness beyond training. However, existing TTS methods for VLAs require additional training, verifiers, and multiple forward passes, making them impractical for deployment. Moreover, they intervene only at action decoding while keeping visual representations fixed-insufficient under perceptual ambiguity, where reconsidering how to perceive is as important as deciding what to do. To address these limitations, we propose SCALE, a simple inference strategy that jointly modulates visual perception and action based on 'self-uncertainty', inspired by uncertainty-driven exploration in Active Inference theory-requiring no additional training, no verifier, and only a single forward pass. SCALE broadens exploration in both perception and action under high uncertainty, while focusing on exploitation when confident-enabling adaptive execution across varying conditions. Experiments on simulated and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that SCALE improves state-of-the-art VLAs and outperforms existing TTS methods while maintaining single-pass efficiency.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

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

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Relatively Smart: A New Approach for Instance-Optimal Learning

arXiv:2603.01346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such marginal-by-marginal guarantees are possible for "most" marginals, with respect to an arbitrary fixed and known measure, but not more generally. We discover that this failure can be attributed to an "indistinguishability" phenomenon: There are marginals which cannot be statistically distinguished from other marginals that require different learning approaches. In such settings, semi-supervised learning cannot certify its guarantees from unlabeled data, rendering them arguably non-actionable. We propose relatively smart learning, a new framework which demands that a supervised learner compete only with the best "certifiable" semi-supervised guarantee. We show that such modest relaxation suffices to bypass the impossibility results from prior work. In the distribution-free setting, we show that the One-Inclusion Graph learner is relatively smart up to squaring the sample complexity, and show that no supervised learning algorithm can do better. For distribution-family settings, we show that relatively smart learning can be impossible or can require idiosyncratic learning approaches, and its difficulty can be non-monotone in the inclusion order on distribution families.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UMA-Split: unimodal aggregation for both English and Mandarin non-autoregressive speech recognition

This paper proposes a unimodal aggregation (UMA) based nonautoregressive model for both English and Mandarin speech recognition. The original UMA explicitly segments and aggregates acoustic frames (with unimodal weights that first monotonically increase and then decrease) of the same text token to learn better representations than regular connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, it only works well in Mandarin. It struggles with other languages, such as English, for which a single syllable may be tokenized into multiple fine-grained tokens, or a token spans fewer than 3 acoustic frames and fails to form unimodal weights. To address this problem, we propose allowing each UMA-aggregated frame map to multiple tokens, via a simple split module that generates two tokens from each aggregated frame before computing the CTC loss.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TINNs: Time-Induced Neural Networks for Solving Time-Dependent PDEs

arXiv:2601.20361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by learning a mesh-free, differentiable solution that can be evaluated anywhere in space and time. However, standard space-time PINNs take time as an input but reuse a single network with shared weights across all times, forcing the same features to represent markedly different dynamics. This coupling degrades error performance and can destabilize training when enforcing PDE, boundary, and initial constraints jointly. We propose Time-Induced Neural Networks (TINNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes the network weights as a learned function of time, allowing the effective spatial representation to evolve over time while maintaining shared structure. The resulting formulation naturally yields a nonlinear least-squares problem, which we optimize efficiently using a Levenberg-Marquardt method. Experiments on various time-dependent PDEs show up to 4 times improved relative error and 10 times faster convergence compared to PINNs and strong baselines.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Excited-State Quantum Chemistry on Qumode-Based Processors via Variational Quantum Deflation

arXiv:2604.13457v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational quantum algorithms on bosonic quantum processors are an emerging paradigm for quantum chemistry calculations, exploiting the natural alignment between molecular structure and harmonic oscillator-based hardware. We introduce the qumode-based variational quantum deflation framework (QumVQD) for finding both electronic and vibrational excited state energies on qumode-based architectures. We validate the approach through electronic structure calculations on H$_{2}$ and linear H$_{4}$, where we introduce Hamming-weight filtering of the Fock basis to enforce particle number conservation and eliminate spurious eigenstates by reducing the required Hilbert space, which reduces the required number of qumodes in turn. We achieve agreement with full configuration interaction (FCI) using the STO-3G basis set within the chemical accuracy threshold at most points along the potential energy surfaces. Extending to the vibrational structure, we combine QumVQD with an existing Hamiltonian fragmentation approach based on Cartan subalgebra, allowing us to compute the vibrational eigenenergies of CO$_{2}$ and H$_{2}$S to spectroscopic accuracy with per-fragment circuits that scale as $O(N)$ in single-qumode gates and $O(N^2)$ in beam-splitter gates for $N$ qumodes. For the case of CO$_{2}$, we get total gate counts more than an order of magnitude smaller than those reported for qubit-based vibrational algorithms at this system size. These results demonstrate that bosonic quantum devices are a viable platform for excited-state quantum chemistry, particularly for vibrational problems where qubit-based methods incur substantial boson-to-qubit mapping overhead.

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

Blueprint First, Model Second: A Framework for Deterministic LLM Workflow

arXiv:2508.02721v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While powerful, the inherent non-determinism of large language model (LLM) agents limits their application in structured operational environments where procedural fidelity and predictable execution are strict requirements. This limitation stems from current architectures that conflate probabilistic, high-level planning with low-level action execution within a single generative process. To address this, we introduce the \textsc{Source Code Agent} framework, a new paradigm built on the ``Blueprint First, Model Second'' philosophy that decouples workflow logic from the generative model. An expert-defined operational procedure is first codified into a source code-based Execution Blueprint, which is then executed by a deterministic engine. The LLM is strategically invoked as a specialized tool to handle bounded, complex sub-tasks within the workflow, but never to decide the workflow's path. We evaluate on the TravelPlanner benchmark for constraint-aware travel planning. The \textsc{Source Code Agent} achieves a 35.56\% final pass rate, a 97.6\% improvement over the state-of-the-art ATLAS baseline (18.00\%) on the same Claude-Sonnet-4 backbone. Critically, it reduces constraint violations by 96.0\% (11 vs 275) while improving execution efficiency by 27.1\% (10.2$\pm$0.7 steps vs 14.0). Two production incident-diagnosis deployments and additional results on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld confirm that the architecture transfers beyond travel planning to procedurally well-defined, constraint-intensive workflows. Our work enables the verifiable and reliable deployment of autonomous agents in applications governed by strict procedural logic.

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

AI systems out-persuade expert humans

arXiv:2606.16475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether it can out-persuade skilled and highly incentivized humans has remained unclear. Here, in a series of four preregistered experiments (n = 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people), we pitted AI systems against a range of human persuaders, including laypeople, winners of a separately preregistered four-round online persuasion tournament, professional canvassers, and world championship debaters. We found that AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with {\pounds}1,000 cash bonuses. In a follow-up study, AI's advantage persisted after experts received a coaching tool that let them practice against the AI that beat them, review their performance history, and see what AI would have said at key moments. We found converging evidence that AI's advantage stemmed from rapidly deploying larger quantities of information: after coaching, expert humans could tie an AI constrained to respond at human speeds and with human-length messages. In a final study, we show that AI's advantage extends to consequential real-world behavior: AI was nearly 3x more effective than professional canvassers from a UK fundraising firm at raising real-money donations to Save the Children. Together, these results establish that frontier AI systems out-persuade expert humans in conversation, with significant implications for political communication.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Variational Consensus Monte Carlo for Bayesian Mixture

arXiv:2606.19643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the privacy, sensitivity and sharing limitations of health data, we present a comprehensive pipeline for inference of Bayesian mixture models within a federated learning setting, i.e. when data cannot be fully shared or pooled across compute nodes. We adopt a Consensus Monte Carlo (CMC) approach, in which an MCMC algorithm is run independently within each data silo to estimate local posterior distributions, which are then aggregated to approximate the posterior over the full data. The variational CMC approach of Rabinovich, Angelino and Jordan (2015) [1] frames the aggregation step as a variational inference problem, but their application to mixtures assumes the number of clusters and key mixture parameters to be known. Our main methodological contributions are: (i) an extension of variational CMC to over-fitted Bayesian mixture models that infer the number of clusters and all model parameters, without requiring conjugacy; (ii) novel cluster-matching algorithms suitable for cross-silo settings in which not every cluster appears in each local dataset; (iii) a number of inference strategies for the aggregation step, matched to different federated learning constraints; and (iv) guidelines for choosing among these in practice. A comprehensive simulation study validates the framework and allows us to compare to state-of-the-art federated learning alternatives. Notably, we show that when the composition of local datasets reflects the underlying clustering structure in the data, our approach can recover small clusters with greater accuracy than standard MCMC applied to the pooled data. We illustrate the framework on large-scale electronic health record data, identifying multi-morbidity patterns in a British geriatric population.

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

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ISAP-3D: Identity-Slot Aligned Part-Aware 3D Generation

Part-aware 3D generation aims to synthesize structured objects with semantically meaningful components, yet often suffers from structural ambiguity due to identity-layout entanglement. Existing methods either infer part identity and spatial layout implicitly, which can lead to unstable part allocation (e.g., slot swapping or part merging), or rely on strong layout conditions that are difficult to obtain in practice. We attribute this ambiguity to identity-slot permutation freedom: without explicit identity-slot alignment, the correspondence between semantic parts and generation slots is not identifiable during training, allowing multiple slot assignments to fit the same supervision and leading to inconsistent decomposition. Based on this insight, we argue that stable part-aware generation requires identity-aligned one-to-one slot modelling. We therefore propose an identity-slot aligned framework, ISAP-3D, which anchors each part with semantic identity tokens and performs identity-conditioned one-to-one layout prediction, followed by layout-conditioned geometry synthesis. Structured local-global conditioning maintains identity alignment across semantic, spatial, and geometric stages. We also construct a part-level dataset with a unified semantic protocol to enable learnable and consistent identity-slot alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved structural stability, controllability, and robustness over state-of-the-art part-aware generation baselines.

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

Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce bootstrapped monitoring, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on multi-turn software engineering tasks (BashArena) across multiple agents and monitors. Bootstrapped monitoring substantially improves catch rates over trusted-only monitoring, even when the untrusted monitor actively colludes with the agent, provided we have access to its raw chain-of-thought. Our results suggest that bootstrapped monitoring can extend the useful lifetime of trusted models in control as AI capabilities advance.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

On-chip semi-device-independent quantum random number generator exploiting contextuality

arXiv:2601.08392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a semi-device-independent quantum random number generator (QRNG) based on the violation of a contextuality inequality, implemented by the integration of two silicon photonic chips. Our system combines a heralded single-photon source with a reconfigurable interferometric mesh to implement qutrit state preparation, transformations, and measurements suitable for testing a KCBS contextuality inequality. This architecture enables the generation of random numbers from the intrinsic randomness of single-photon interference in a complex optical network, while simultaneously allowing a quantitative certification of their security without requiring entanglement. We observe a contextuality violation exceeding the classical bound by more than 10{\sigma}, unambiguously confirming non-classical behavior. From this violation, we certify a conditional min-entropy per experimental round of Hmin = 0.077 +- 0.002, derived via a tailored semidefinite-programming-based security analysis. Each measurement outcome therefore contains at least 0.077 +- 0.002 bits of extractable genuine randomness, corresponding to an asymptotic generation rate of 21.7 +- 0.5 bits/s. These results establish a viable route towards general-purpose, untrusted quantum random number generators compatible with practical integrated photonic quantum networks.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

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

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

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Computational Safety for Generative AI: A Hypothesis Testing Perspective

Authors:

arXiv:2502.12445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety.