Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2508.00126

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

Authors:

Pablo P\'aez-Velasco↗Niclas Schilling↗Samuel O. Scalet↗Frank Verstraete↗\'Angela Capel↗

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.16681

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Authors:

Dong Liu↗Yanxuan Yu↗

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19368

Neural Architectures as Functional Priors in Physics-Informed Control Problems

Authors:

Sonia Rubio Herranz↗Fernando Carlos L\'opez Hern\'andez↗Antonio L\'opez Montes↗

arXiv:2606.19368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work we investigate the role of neural architectures as implicit functional priors in control problems governed by ordinary differential equations. Rather than focusing on highly complex problems, our objective is to investigate architecture-dependent effects in controlled dynamical systems within the simplest physically interpretable settings possible. In particular, we study a controlled linear RLC electrical circuit and a nonlinear Duffing-type dynamical system. Both systems are analyzed first through classical optimal-control formulations and later through PINN-based approaches. We compare different combinations of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Fourier-based KAN-like architectures, and analyze their influence on the resulting controls. The numerical experiments suggest that different architectural choices systematically generate qualitatively distinct controls, even under identical governing equations, loss functionals, initial and target states, training parameters and physical constraints. Significant differences appear in the spectral structure, smoothness, energy distribution, and phase-space behavior of the learned solutions. A central observation of this work is the emergence of a functional specialization phenomenon when the neural architectures are allowed sufficient freedom to shape the structure of the learned controls. More specifically, in the systems considered here, Fourier-based architectures tend to produce trajectories with richer oscillatory content, whereas smoother low-frequency-biased architectures tend to generate more regular and energetically efficient controls. This suggests that different functional components of the control problem may be handled more efficiently by different neural architectures, leading to an implicit specialization between state representation and control generation.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.02379

Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors:

Nolan B. Gutierrez↗Joseph M. Cloud↗William J. Beksi↗

arXiv:2601.02379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.

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05.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2510.24679

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

Authors:

Fabio Durastante↗Miryam Gnazzo↗Beatrice Meini↗

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.01904

Combating Data Laundering in LLM Training

Authors:

Muxing Li↗Zesheng Ye↗Sharon Li↗Feng Liu↗

arXiv:2604.01904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-hoc unauthorized-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) typically assumes a query-with-originals regime: rights holders query a target LLM with raw proprietary data and assess whether the model assigns them stronger memorization-based detection signals, e.g., higher confidence or lower loss, than held-out non-training reference texts. We show that this regime becomes brittle under data laundering, where the target LLM is trained on semantics-preserving but stylistically or structurally transformed surrogates of proprietary data to obfuscate provenance. Since training-time exposure occurs in the laundered form, memorization signals may no longer appear on the originals, collapsing the candidate-reference signal separation that standard detectors rely on. We counter this threat by studying laundering-aware detection with raw proprietary data, a held-out reference corpus, and query access to the target LLM, while the laundering transformation is undisclosed. Since exact recovery of the laundered corpus is infeasible, we infer a detection-useful synthesis process via an auxiliary LLM that maps originals into training-like queries. To make this search tractable, we introduce Synthesis Data Reversion (SDR), which constrains the unbounded space of natural-language transformations through a goal-details abstraction: a high-level transformation goal, e.g., "lyrical rewriting", and fine-grained details, e.g., "with vivid imagery". SDR identifies the most likely goal and iteratively refines details so synthesized queries elicit stronger target-model detection signals. Evaluated on the MIMIR benchmark against diverse laundering practices and target LLM families (Pythia, Llama2, and Falcon), SDR consistently restores detection signals, offering a practical auditing layer against data laundering.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15049

Gaussian Spatial Priors for Anatomy-Aware Object Detection in Surgical Videos

Authors:

Yunfan Li↗Artem Shmelev↗Himanshu Gupta↗

Detecting anatomical structures in surgical video is essential for intraoperative safety frameworks such as the Critical View of Myopectineal Orifice (CVMPO) in inguinal hernia repair. While prominent structures like the Cooper's Ligament and Triangle of Doom are reliably detected by standard methods, smaller structures such as the epigastric vessels remain challenging due to their visual ambiguity and intermittent visibility. We observe that the spatial relationship between structures is anatomically constrained, and propose a Gaussian Spatial Prior (GSP) module that encodes this relationship as a compact, parametric bias injected into the self-attention of a DAB-DETR decoder. The prior is computed offline from training annotations as a small set of frozen Gaussian parameters and recomputed at each decoder layer using the iteratively refined reference points. On a dataset of inguinal hernia repair videos with 5-fold cross-validation, GSP improves dependent class detection by $+33.5\%$ ($AP_{50}$) over DAB-DETR and $+53.9\%$ over YOLOv26, while also improving anchor detection by $+6.0\%$. These gains are statistically significant across all folds ($p=0.012$, paired $t-$test).

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08.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20 DOI: HASH:52e8367f8aa3db295f94b970d617a8f5

A network approach to DNA methylation clocks

Authors:

Carcedo↗Yang↗S.-G↗Smiljanic↗Neunman↗Wennstedt↗Degerman↗Lizana↗

Biological age predicts health and lifespan better than chronological age, but remains difficult to measure. One leading molecular proxy for biological age is DNA methylation, which underlies age predictors known as "clocks". These clocks use penalized linear regression to predict chronological age from methylation levels using selected cytosine–guanine pairs (CpGs) along DNA. Although they predict chronological age within a few years and track mortality risk, there are several issues. Different clocks share a vanishingly small number of CpG sites, many of which show weak associations with age. Also, the clocks often do not transfer across methylation array platforms. This paper takes a network approach to better understand these issues. By using 12 public datasets from human blood, we build a co-methylation network of the sites that show the strongest age correlation. After pruning weak links, we find that it has a small number of large modules of covarying CpGs surrounded by many small modules and singleton sites. These modules are biologically interpretable, as they are associated with CpG island contexts and enriched for distinct Gene Ontology functions. We also map five established clocks onto this network (Horvath, Hannum, AltumAge, Skin & Blood, and Han) and find that they select some CpGs from the same module. This suggests that they are more similar than they appear. The network structure also suggests new ways to build clocks. A simple clock that retains one CpG per module matches the performance of established clocks. A second one, built from module-level principal components, outperforms all five established clocks in three validation cohorts and is transferable across array platforms (Illumina Infinium Methylation 450K or EPIC arrays). Overall, the network perspective shifts attention from individual CpG sites to modules of covarying sites. This perspective helps explain why DNA methylation clocks perform so well despite their differences and provides a more systematic approach for developing the next generation of aging biomarkers.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2603.13854

Power Term Polynomial Algebra for Boolean Logic

Authors:

Emanuele Sansone↗Armando Solar-Lezama↗

arXiv:2603.13854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce power term polynomial algebra, a representation language for Boolean formulae designed to bridge conjunctive normal form (CNF) and algebraic normal form (ANF). The language is motivated by the tiling mismatch between these representations: direct CNFANF conversion may cause exponential blowup unless formulas are decomposed into smaller fragments, typically through auxiliary variables and side constraints. In contrast, our framework addresses this mismatch within the representation itself, compactly encoding structured families of monomials while representing CNF clauses directly, thereby avoiding auxiliary variables and constraints at the abstraction level. We formalize the language through power terms and power term polynomials, define their semantics, and show that they admit algebraic operations corresponding to Boolean polynomial addition and multiplication. We prove several key properties of the language: disjunctive clauses admit compact canonical representations; power terms support local shortening and expansion rewrite rules; and products of atomic terms can be systematically rewritten within the language. Together, these results yield a symbolic calculus that enables direct manipulation of formulas without expanding them into ordinary ANF. The resulting framework provides a new intermediate representation and rewriting calculus that bridges clause-based and algebraic reasoning and suggests new directions for structure-aware CNFANF conversion and hybrid reasoning methods.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13387

Representation-Induced Symmetry Trapping in Adaptive Variational Quantum Simulations of Multi-Reference Topologies

Authors:

Hermawan Kresno Dipojono↗

arXiv:2606.13387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the trainability of adaptive quantum chemistry algorithms under multi-reference static correlation requires understanding how representation topologies intertwine with molecular geometry. We systematically expose a deep physical dependence on point-group symmetry by evaluating a spin-conserved SUSD operator pool across highly stretched configurations (2 x Re) of asymmetric LiH, symmetric BeH2, and asymmetric H2O. Under asymmetric distortions, the non-local mapping constraints of the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation create an optimization trapping effect–an encodement-locked manifestation of the broader barren plateau crisis. Crucially, by comparing these to the symmetrical stretching baseline of BeH2, we demonstrate that the preservation of point-group symmetry structurally protects the optimization landscape, proving that ansatz symmetry restrictions are necessary but insufficient without accounting for the underlying fermion-to-qubit representation. While current methods rely on numerical pruning to throttle pool sizes, our structural approach establishes that the mapping representation remains a critical factor in maintaining landscape trainability. Furthermore, exploiting structural overlap within our pool, we introduce a covariance-driven, adaptive shot-allocation filter. Diverging from static energy-variance minimization frameworks, our allocation engine operates as a dynamic runtime diagnostic tool. By continuously monitoring the gradient precision threshold epsilon, it aggressively prunes dead symmetry channels and triggers an automated circuit-termination sequence upon detecting representation-induced flat-lined states (dE/dtheta approx 0). This integration of algebraic measurement reuse with topology-aware statistical filtering provides a promising, resource-efficient strategy for executing deep variational algorithms on early fault-tolerant architectures.

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11.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16959

Diagonal-Budgeted Trotterization for Efficient Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation

Authors:

Srikar Chundury↗Blake Burgstahler↗Jiajia Li↗In-Saeng Suh↗Frank Mueller↗

arXiv:2606.16959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient classical simulation of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is often bottlenecked by exponential state growth and the overhead of generic sparse linear algebra. We introduce diagonal-budgeted Trotterization, a structure-aware strategy that decomposes Hamiltonians into factors preserving diagonal sparsity while tightly controlling fidelity loss. Our implementation, HamSim, utilizes a compact diagonal-sparse data layout and specialized C++/CUDA kernels to bypass the overheads of generic formats like CSR. By leveraging SIMD vectorization, multithreading, and GPU acceleration, HamSim achieves high performance across heterogeneous architectures. Benchmarks on the HamLib suite show that HamSim significantly outperforms Qiskit-Aer. On CPUs, HamSim attains speedups of $182$–$1,269\times$ on optimization instances (TSP, MaxCut) and $4.8$–$841\times$ on physical models (TFIM, Heisenberg). On GPUs, it achieves up to $178\times$ speedup for $12$–$16$ qubit problems. Unlike traditional Trotterization, HamSim maintains near-perfect fidelity without requiring exponential steps. This demonstrates that diagonal-aware numerical kernels provide a scalable foundation for high-fidelity classical Hamiltonian simulation.

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12.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16715

Testing for a Hidden Geometry in Random Graphs

Authors:

Amit Silber↗Mor Oren-Loberman↗Wasim Huleihel↗

arXiv:2606.16715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of detecting a faint geometric signal hidden in an otherwise random graph. Formally, we consider a hypothesis testing problem in which, under the null, the observed graph is an Erdős–Rényi random graph $\mathcal{G}(n,q)$, while under the alternative a random geometric graph $\mathcal{G}(k,q,d)$ is planted on $k\le n$ vertices. The planted subgraph is generated from independent random points on the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$, with edges determined by latent geometric proximity and calibrated to have edge density $q$. Our goal is to characterize the statistical and computational limits of detecting this hidden geometry. We derive sharp information-theoretic lower bounds that identify regimes where detection is impossible and provide algorithms that achieve these limits whenever detection is feasible. We further investigate the computational complexity of the problem and determine when efficient polynomial-time tests exist. The model exhibits an easy–hard–impossible phase transition: some regimes allow efficient detection, others permit detection only with computationally intractable procedures, and still others render detection impossible even with unlimited computational power. As evidence for the computational barrier, we prove that all low-degree polynomial algorithms fail throughout the conjecturally hard regime, demonstrating a sharp gap between statistical and computational feasibility.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.28882

GrowLoop: Self-Evolving Conversation Evaluation Seeded by Human

Authors:

Yihang Lin↗Yunze Gao↗Zeyang Lin↗Dongbo Li↗Kun Peng↗Yue Liu↗

With the rapid advancement of large language models, evaluating human-likeness in open-ended conversation has become increasingly important. However, human-likeness is a form of tacit knowledge that humans perceive intuitively, yet the underlying criteria resist explicit formulation. Human judgments vary widely, with strong agreement on some cases and legitimate disagreement on others. Meanwhile, the criteria behind human judgments remain implicit, leaving no clear basis for constructing cases. Further, what counts as human-likeness is not static, but evolving with model capability and human expectations. Despite progress in evaluation methods such as expert-authored benchmarks, Reward Models, and self-evolving benchmarks, none addresses all three challenges simultaneously. Therefore, we propose GrowLoop, a self-evolving conversation evaluation system that continuously adapts as models advance and scenarios shift. Starting from minimal human seed annotations, LLM agents iteratively extract and refine evaluation rubrics through Heuristic Learning. Human-AI agreement is required where annotators converge, while only plausibility is expected where they diverge. Moreover, the Rubric-Case co-evolution mechanism enables continuous evolution. When the evaluation target shifts, new human seeds expand the system's coverage accordingly. When applied to human-likeness evaluation in open-ended conversation, the AI judge guided by these rubrics not only substantially outperforms existing methods in alignment with human judgments, but also uncovers issues that annotators overlook. The resulting benchmark effectively discriminates models across capability tiers and reveals where they fall short, while generalizing to new scenarios and adapting as models advance. Our work shifts the benchmarking paradigm from manual updates or difficulty scaling to comprehensive, continuous self-evolution.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18832

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

Authors:

K. Darshana Abeyrathna↗Sara El Mekkaoui↗Nils Enric Canut Taugb{\o}l↗Anuja Vats↗

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14245

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

Authors:

Ali Vefghi↗Zahed Rahmati↗Mohammad Akbari↗

arXiv:2606.14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque. We present an interpretability audit of BridgeDPI architecture on three different datasets including Gao, Human, and C.elegans. This study combines gradient-based attributions – integrated gradients, saliency, layer-wise relevance propagation, SmoothGrad, and SmoothGrad-IG – with feature-wise occlusion ablation and strict intersection consensus across methods to reduce single-explainer bias. We summarize sensitivity and signed effects at raw inputs, at the bridge similarity scaffold, and through the graph convolution, including edge-level sensitivities and targeted edge removals. The results show that explainability is most informative when treated as model criticism: it reveals modality dominance, padding and special-token artifacts, dataset-dependent cooperative versus suppressive effects across layers, and chemistry-consistent fragment and composition motifs where methods agree. These analyses do not substitute for structural or experimental ground truth, yet they can provide testable hypotheses for downstream validation in computational drug discovery pipelines. More broadly, applying modern XAI to contemporary DTI/DTA models is still an early pass over the rich structure implicit in trained weights and data – yet even this first layer of scrutiny already helps researchers relate predictions to drug- and target-side representations and to prioritize external validation.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2504.17768

The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs

Authors:

Piotr Nawrot↗Robert Li↗Renjie Huang↗Sebastian Ruder↗Kelly Marchisio↗Edoardo M. Ponti↗

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the largest-scale empirical analysis to date of training-free sparse attention, evaluating six methods across multiple model families and sizes, sequences up to 128K tokens, and sparsity levels up to 0.95 (i.e., $1/20$ attention budget) on nine diverse tasks. We first organise the rapidly evolving landscape of sparse attention methods into a taxonomy along four design axes. Our analysis then yields actionable insights: 1) sparse attention is effective: larger sparse models outperform smaller dense ones at equivalent cost, improving the Pareto frontier; 2) for the training-free methods we study, fine-grained per-query importance estimation during prefilling remains impractical-due to both the cost of estimation and the lack of sparse kernels that translate fine-grained sparsity into wall-clock gains-forcing a task-dependent choice between global-to-token and block-to-block selection. Instead, during decoding, token-to-page selection becomes feasible, enabling better generalisation and higher sparsity tolerance; 3) longer sequences tolerate higher sparsity, suggesting that fixed-budget methods in production are suboptimal. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for deploying sparse attention and methodological recommendations for future evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/PiotrNawrot/sparse-frontier.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18240

Impulse Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes: Equivalence of Degeneracy and Code-Shortening

Authors:

Shobhit Bhatnagar↗Michele Pacenti↗Nithin Raveendran↗David Declercq↗Bane Vasi\'c↗

arXiv:2606.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction is essential for building scalable quantum computers. Within the stabilizer formalism, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane framework constructs quantum codes from pairs of classical linear codes. A distinctive feature in this setting is degeneracy, where multiple equivalent error estimates exist-a phenomenon that has no classical counterpart, and the lack of a meaningful classical coding-theoretic interpretation of which has remained a gap in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that degeneracy is closely related to the classical operation of shortening of a linear block code. Interestingly, the shortening here takes place at the decoder rather than at the encoder. Leveraging this insight, we present a parallel decoding scheme for quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we term impulse decoding, that significantly outperforms belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding, as well as several other existing techniques, under both code-capacity and circuit-level noise, with significantly lesser complexity. We then present another algorithm based on decoding of residual errors, which when combined with impulse decoding achieves further performance improvement under circuit-level noise.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2504.14582

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

Authors:

Zheng Chen↗Kai Liu↗Jue Gong↗Jingkai Wang↗Lei Sun↗Zongwei Wu↗Radu Timofte↗Yulun Zhang↗Xiangyu Kong↗Xiaoxuan Yu↗Hyunhee Park↗Suejin Han↗…

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16103

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Authors:

Duc-Manh Phan↗Ngoc-Dai Tran↗Duy-Khang Do↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.20726

Everywhere Valid Bounds on False Discovery Proportions in Conformal Inference

Authors:

Ziang Song↗Ying Jin↗Emmanuel J. Cand\`es↗

arXiv:2605.20726v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern applications of conformal inference to multiple testing problems, such as outlier detection and candidate selection, often involve selecting test samples whose conformal p-values fall below a threshold. The quality of such methods is often measured by the false discovery proportion (FDP), defined as the fraction of incorrect selections. Existing approaches typically control the expected value of the FDP, using methods such as the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. This approach fails to provide high-probability bounds on the realized false discovery proportion and invalidates statistical guarantees if the rejection threshold is selected after inspecting the data. This paper establishes finite-sample, distribution-free upper bounds on the FDP that hold simultaneously over all possible rejection thresholds, enabling arbitrary post hoc selection of the threshold. Simultaneous validity is achieved by constructing a high-probability envelope for the empirical distribution function of null conformal p-values by sampling from their joint distribution. Furthermore, our framework allows practitioners to modulate the envelope's shape, thereby producing tight bounds in rejection regions of primary interest. We use this flexible approach to derive simultaneous FDP upper bounds for both outlier detection and conformal selection. We demonstrate through synthetic and real-data experiments that the resulting bounds are both valid and substantially less conservative than those derived from existing approaches.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16601

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Authors:

Dingrong Wang↗Xian Tao↗Zhen Qu↗Hengliang Luo↗Xinyi Gong↗Fei Shen↗Zhengtao Zhang↗Guiguang Ding↗

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2511.07300

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

Authors:

Sami Abdul Sater↗Maxime Garnier↗Thierry Martinez↗Harold Ollivier↗Ulysse Chabaud↗

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.

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23.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:9f1639bd0c8bf9c6ed66c21b8d1f4115

Correcting spatial transcriptomics data affected by a prevalent transcript leakage problem across platforms, species, and tissues

Authors:

Shi↗C. H↗Zhai↗Chow↗S. H.-C↗Li↗Carver↗C. M↗Teneche↗M. G↗Flores↗Kern↗…

Spatial transcriptomics has been widely applied to study the spatial distribution of cell types, cell states, and specific gene expression in tissue samples. However, we show that there is a prevalent transcript leakage problem in spatial transcriptomics data, where transcripts expressed by a cell diffuse to its neighborhood and are recurrently detected in the nearby cells. By analyzing published data sets, we show that this problem is general across data produced from different tissues and different species using different imaging-based and sequencing-based spatial transcriptomics platforms. It affects both upstream tasks such as expression quantification as well as downstream tasks such as cell-type annotation and detection of spatially-dependent gene expression. To tackle the transcript leakage problem, we propose a reference-free Bayesian model-based method, DeLeakage, which cleans up the data much more effectively than existing denoising methods. DeLeakage also improves cell-type annotation and avoids false detection of spatially dependent expression.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18820

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

Authors:

Jiaxi Liu↗Aiping Yang↗Yuhang Yang↗Shuqi Zhang↗Zewei Dong↗Jiangming Yang↗Xuebin Chen↗

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

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25.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:842fdc0bc809bb1b12926748072c72a5

scMagnifier: Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes via GRN-informed perturbations and consensus clustering

Authors:

Zhenhui He↗

by Zhenhui He, Dong Kangning Resolving fine-grained cell subtypes in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data remains challenging, as their subtle transcriptional differences are often obscured by technical noise and data sparsity. Here, we present scMagnifier, a consensus clustering framework that leverages gene regulatory network (GRN)-informed in silico perturbations to amplify subtle transcriptional differences and uncover latent cell subpopulations. scMagnifier perturbs candidate transcription factors (TFs), propagates perturbation effects through cluster-specific GRNs to simulate post-perturbation expression profiles, and integrates clustering results across multiple perturbations into stable subtype assignments. Additionally, scMagnifier introduces regulatory perturbation consensus UMAP (rpcUMAP), a perturbation-aware visualization that provides clearer separation between cell subtypes and guides the selection of the optimal number of clusters. In both single-batch and multi-batch benchmarks, scMagnifier consistently improves the resolution and accuracy of fine-grained cell type identification. Notably, when integrated with spatial clustering methods such as STAGATE, scMagnifier is compatible with spatial transcriptomics workflows and effectively reveals tumor cell subtypes and their spatial organization in ovarian cancer.

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