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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

Authors:
Hua-Li Chen↗Hsien-Yi Hsieh↗Chien-Ming Wu↗Ole Steuernagel↗Ray-Kuang Lee↗

arXiv:2606.24242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $\Xi$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $\Xi$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $\Xi$ after the beam splitter mixing with $\Xi$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Metacognitive Myopia in Large Language Models

Authors:
Florian Scholten↗Tobias R. Rebholz↗Mandy H\"utter↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potentially harmful biases that reinforce culturally embedded stereotypes, influence moral judgments, or amplify positive evaluations of majority groups. We propose metacognitive myopia as a cognitive-ecological framework accounting for a conglomerate of established and emerging LLM biases. Our theoretical framework posits that biased samples in the information environment cause five symptoms of metacognitive myopia in LLMs: integration of invalid embeddings, susceptibility to redundant information, neglect of base rates in conditional computation, decision rules based on frequency, and inappropriate higher-order statistical inference for nested data structures. Moreover, it posits that the two main components of metacognition, monitoring and control, could account for these five symptoms. Accordingly, we further outline how monitoring and control could be approximated technically, for instance, through hidden parallel reasoning histories that allow interactive LLMs to evaluate risks of myopic inference before generating overt responses. Our theoretical framework provides a novel perspective on flawed human-machine interactions and agentic AI and raises significant ethical concerns regarding the implementation of LLMs in organizational structures and high-stakes decisions.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

Authors:
Nitay Mayo↗Tal Mor↗Yossi Weinstein↗

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

Authors:
Oleg Smirnov↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Versioned Late Materialization for Ultra-Long Sequence Training in Recommendation Systems at Scale

Authors:
Liang Guo↗Ge Song↗Litao Deng↗Jianhui Sun↗Chufeng Hu↗Lu Zhang↗Zhen Ma↗Shouwei Chen↗Weiran Liu↗Sarang Masti Sreeshylan↗Xiaoxuan Meng↗Yanzun Huang↗…

arXiv:2604.24806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) follow scaling laws with sequence length, driving the frontier toward ultra-long User Interaction History (UIH). However, the industry-standard "Fat Row" paradigm, which pre-materializes these sequences into every training example, creates a storage and I/O wall where data infrastructure usage exceeds GPU training capacity due to data redundancy that is amplified in multi-tenant environments where models with vastly different sequence length requirements share a union dataset. We present a versioned late materialization paradigm that eliminates this redundancy by storing UIH once in a normalized, immutable tier and reconstructing sequences just-in-time during training via lightweight versioned pointers. The system ensures Online-to-Offline (O2O) consistency through a bifurcated protocol that prevents future leakage across both streaming and batch training, while a read-optimized immutable storage layer provides multi-dimensional projection pushdown for heterogeneous model tenants. Disaggregated data preprocessing with pipelined I/O prefetching and data-affinity optimizations masks the latency of training-time sequence reconstruction, keeping training throughput compute-bound by GPUs. Deployed on production DLRMs, the system reduces training data infrastructure resource usage while enabling aggressive sequence length scaling that delivers significant model quality gains, serving as the foundational data infrastructure for modern recommendation model architectures, including HSTU and ULTRA-HSTU.

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

MA-DLE: Speech-based Automatic Depression Level Estimation via Memory Augmentation

Authors:
Xuzhi Wang↗Xinran Wu↗Ziping Zhao↗Jianhua Tao↗Bj\"orn W. Schuller↗

Speech-based automatic estimation of depression levels is essential for enabling early detection and timely intervention, particularly in resource-constrained mental health settings. In recent years, deep learning has demonstrated impressive success across various domains, including affective computing and mental health assessment. Most existing approaches rely on RNN-based architectures (such as LSTM and GRU) to model temporal information for depression estimation. However, the extracted features often emphasize only a few adjacent speech segments, limiting their ability to capture long-range dependencies. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a memory-based feature augmentation method that enhances the representational capacity of GRU-extracted features. Rather than indiscriminately incorporating historical data, our memory bank is designed to selectively integrate two types of components in order to reduce redundancy and irrelevance: (1) historical temporal features that closely resemble the current GRU output, offering complementary contextual information; and (2) dynamic memory features identified based on feature variability, which capture behavioral and emotional fluctuations indicative of depressive symptoms. To effectively fuse the memory-augmented features with GRU outputs, we further design a Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module. Our method is evaluated on the widely used DAIC-WOZ and E-DAIC datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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

Unified Multimodal Autoregressive Modeling with Shared Context-Visual Tokenizer is Key to Unification

Authors:
Wujian Peng↗Lingchen Meng↗Yuxuan Cai↗Xianwei Zhuang↗Yuhuan Yang↗Rongyao Fang↗Chenfei Wu↗Junyang Lin↗Zuxuan Wu↗Shuai Bai↗

Unified Multimodal Modeling aims to integrate visual understanding and generation within a single system. However, existing approaches typically rely on two disparate visual tokenizers, which splits the representation space and hinders truly unified modeling. We propose UniAR, a unified autoregressive framework where a single discrete visual tokenizer serves as the key bridge between understanding and generation, enabling a shared context in which the model can directly interpret its own generated visual tokens without additional re-encoding. UniAR adapts a pretrained vision encoder with multi-level feature fusion and a lookup-free bitwise quantization scheme, preserving both high-level semantics and low-level details while scaling the effective visual vocabulary at minimal cost. Building on this, the unified autoregressive model adopts parallel-bitwise-prediction to jointly predict spatially grouped, multi-level visual codes, substantially reducing visual sequence length and accelerating generation. Finally, a diffusion-based visual decoder operates on discrete visual tokens to decode high-fidelity images. Through large-scale pre-training, followed by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, UniAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on image generation and image editing while remaining competitive on multimodal understanding benchmarks. The project page is available at https://sharelab-sii.github.io/uniar-web.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Authors:
Viet-Hung Tran↗Ngoc-Bao Nguyen↗Son T. Mai↗Hans Vandierendonck↗Ira Assent↗Alex Kot↗Ngai-Man Cheung↗

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

Circuit Synchronization Precedes Generalization: Causal Evidence from Fourier Structure in Grokking Transformers

Authors:
Achyuthan Sivasankar↗

arXiv:2606.12966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grokking – where a transformer on modular arithmetic suddenly transitions from near-chance to near-perfect validation accuracy – is attributed to a Fourier circuit, but its timing, causal structure, and controllability remain poorly understood. We introduce the Frequency Synchronization Degree (FSD), a normalised, permutation-tested metric for Fourier circuit synchronisation requiring no prior circuit knowledge. Across nine modular addition configurations (primes p in {53, 71, 97, 113, 131}, three seeds), FSD synchronises 500-3,000 steps before grokking (mean lead +1,722 steps; all nine positive, sign-test p~0.004), and precedes a restricted-logit loss baseline (Nanda et al.'s excluded loss) in all nine cases, making it the earliest available predictor. We provide direct causal evidence that the inter-phase gap is a regularisation phenomenon: forking training at the FSD-ceiling step and varying weight decay lambda produces strictly monotone earlier grokking, with Delta_t proportional to 1/lambda. This law replicates across three primes (p in {53,97,131}; R^2=1.00 and R^2=0.99 for two clean cases), captured as Delta_t ~ C/lambda, consistent with (1/lambda)*log(||W_mem||/tau). Architecture ablations show an attention-only model groks with a strong FSD precursor; an MLP-only model never groks; a single-layer model's FSD lags, confirming the precursor is a multi-block circuit property.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

Authors:
Jiequan Cui↗Beier Zhu↗Qingshan Xu↗Zhuotao Tian↗Xiaojuan Qi↗Bei Yu↗Hanwang Zhang↗Richang Hong↗

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Theoretical Study for Generating Optical GKP State via a Single-Photon-Added Squeezed Vacuum

Authors:
Deriyan Senjaya↗

arXiv:2606.12467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A theoretical framework is developed to analyze the generation of the optical GKP state using a single-photon-added squeezed vacuum. This state, defined by the squeezing parameter $r$, is injected into a 50:50 beam splitter, and the optical GKP state is obtained through conditional measurement at one output port. The single-photon-added squeezed vacuum is especially prominent in this context because it provides a simpler and more experimentally accessible ingredient than Schrodinger cat states, while conditional measurement ensures projection onto a state that closely approximates the finite-energy GKP form. Fidelity is employed to quantify this closeness, and the analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves a maximum fidelity of 85% at a squeezing level of $3.76 \ dB$. This performance surpasses approaches based on squeezed optical odd Schrodinger cat states, underscoring the single-photon-added squeezed vacuum as a practical and effective pathway toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.

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

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Itamar Pres↗Laura Ruis↗Melat Ghebreselassie↗Belinda Z. Li↗Jacob Andreas↗

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Least-Action-Guided Diffusion for Physical Extrapolation

Authors:
Zhongxin Yang↗Yuanwei Bin↗Xiang I. A. Yang↗Shiyi Chen↗

arXiv:2606.11277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable extrapolation remains a central challenge for generative models in computational physics, because models trained over finite ranges of time, parameters, or geometries may produce physically inconsistent predictions outside the training distribution. We introduce a least-action-principle-guided diffusion, LAPG, a framework that promotes physical consistency during inference rather than relying solely on constraints imposed during training. The method combines a conditional score-based diffusion model with an action-derived physical guidance score. In the first stage, the learned score model generates an in-distribution proposal; in the second, an action-based variational prior refines this proposal toward the target out-of-distribution condition. This formulation turns the principle of least action into a differentiable inference-time correction mechanism and provides an alternative to pointwise residual penalties that often require empirical loss balancing. We evaluate LAPG on representative ordinary- and partial-differential-equation systems, including free fall, conservative and dissipative spring-mass dynamics, interacting point vortices, and potential flow over parameterized airfoils. In temporal, parameter, and geometric extrapolation tests, LAPG reduces phase drift, preserves dissipative decay, captures vortex motion, and improves the lift response of airfoil flows compared with training-time physics-informed baselines.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Two-Stage Statistical Framework for Evaluating Associative Interference in Large Language Models

Authors:
Achraf Cohen↗Andrew Kincaid↗

arXiv:2606.14117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for bias using adaptations of human psychological paradigms, yet methodological limitations-particularly the conflation of refusal behavior with task performance-have hindered clear interpretation. Here, we adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a controlled, forced-choice framework and introduce a two-stage modeling approach that separates response compliance from task-consistent classification. Across three contemporary LLMs (Claude Sonnet-4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5), we evaluate associative interference, defined as reduced task-consistency in incongruent relative to congruent conditions. While compliance with the structured response format was uniformly high, interference effects varied substantially across models and domains. Claude Sonnet-4 exhibited strong interference in the Gender–Career domain (DeltaP = 0.086, 95% CrI [0.026, 0.173]) and smaller but credible effects in Gender–Science. Gemini 2.5 Pro showed attenuated interference, and GPT-5 exhibited minimal or no detectable interference across domains. These findings demonstrate that IAT-style associative asymmetries are not a universal property of LLMs, but instead depend on model-specific characteristics. By isolating interference from compliance and modeling item-level variability, this study provides a principled framework for evaluating structured response patterns in LLMs. The results highlight the importance of model-specific assessment and suggest that associative interference can be substantially mitigated in modern systems.

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

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

Authors:
Changmin Yu↗M\'at\'e Lengyel↗

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Biochemical fingerprinting of human scalp hair reveals endocannabinoid related compounds as potential biomarker indicators of altered mitochondrial bioenergetics in immune cells from female patients with major depressive disorder

Authors:
Bondy↗De Punder↗Salinas-Manrique↗Hennessy↗Stoll↗Hill↗M. M↗Dietrich↗D. E↗Karabatsiakis↗

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a severe psychiatric disorder that affects more than 350 million people worldwide, yet its biomolecular mechanisms are incompletely understood, and clinically applicable markers remain elusive. To shed new light on the underlying pathophysiology of MDD across multiple research disciplines, we first used a biochemical fingerprinting approach with human hair (the first 3 cm cut from the scalp) to identify changes in the total set of detectable metabolites and lipids (metabolipidomics) using quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (qToF-MS). In this study, we focused on endocannabinoid (ECB)-related lipid compounds and identified 7 candidate markers that differed between depressed and non-depressed female participants. Two phosphatidylinositols, namely PI 24:0 and PI 37:4, showed dose-dependent associations with the severity of depressive symptoms. Finally, to bridge hair findings with previously reported results in blood, we tested associations between changes in identified ECB-related compounds and parameters of mitochondrial respiratory activity in peripheral blood mononuclear cells. We found 17 significant associations, with the strongest effects for the lipids PI 24:0, MGDG-O 16:3, PG 12:0, and PI 37:4. Our approach not only identified novel associations between endocannabinoid (ECB)-related lipid dysregulation and impaired mitochondrial energy metabolism in MDD but also revealed ECB-related lipids as a possible surrogate marker of impaired bioenergetic metabolism in MDD, at least in immune cells. More research is needed to replicate these findings, ideally by testing reversibility in longitudinal intervention studies and by including both sexes in larger cohorts.

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

RefGC-SR$^2$: Reference-guided Generated Content Super-Resolution and Refinement

Authors:
Jeahun Sung↗Dahyeon Kye↗Soo Ye Kim↗Jihyong Oh↗

Reference-guided generation (e.g., object compositing, customization) has progressed rapidly, yet current pipelines share a fundamental limitation: the object-centric high-resolution reference image (HRRI) provided by users is downsampled to a fixed low-resolution (LR) before being fed into the model, so the fine-grained details are discarded before the output is even produced. In addition, the generation step then introduces its own artifacts (e.g., identity distortion) on top of this loss. Existing reference-guided generated content refinement (RefGCR) methods can correct some of these artifacts but still operate in the LR domain; reference-guided super-resolution (RefSR) methods recover resolution but assume natural-image degradations and ignore the artifact distribution of generative pipelines. To address both gaps in a single formulation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided generated content super-resolution-refinement (RefGC-SR$^2$), where the original HRRI is reused at the post-processing stage to recover lost details, refine generative artifacts, and upscale the output simultaneously. We construct the first real-world triplet data generation pipeline for this RefGC-SR$^2$ task, training a diptych-conditioned generator to synthesize paired low-quality anchors that public pretrained models cannot provide. We further present a frequency-aware diffusion transformer model for RefGC-SR$^2$ that selectively injects fine details from the HRRI while removing generative artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RefGC-SR$^2$ model successfully (i) refines the object identity faithfully with respect to the reference, and (ii) recovers high-resolution details, so that the final result is significantly higher quality and practically more usable compared to existing RefGCR and RefSR baselines.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Critic Architecture Matters: Dual vs. Unified Critics for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Authors:
Mehmet Turan Yard{\i}mc{\i}↗

arXiv:2606.11891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning for humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation within a single policy. A natural design choice is whether to use a single (unified) critic that estimates the combined value of all objectives, or separate (dual) critics with disjoint reward signals. We present a controlled comparison on the Unitree G1 humanoid (23 active DoF) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, training loco-manipulation policies through a sequential curriculum spanning 13 levels from stationary reaching to walking with variable-orientation targets. In standardized evaluation, dual-critic policies reach targets 3.5$\times$ faster (6.5 vs. 22.6 simulation steps), achieve 2$\times$ higher throughput (14.3 vs. 7.0 validated reaches per 1,000 steps), and attain higher validated reach rates (65.2% vs. 53.8%) compared to the unified-critic policy. Notably, additional anti-gaming reward mechanisms provide no further improvement beyond the architectural change alone (60.9% vs. 65.2%). These results have direct implications for the emerging paradigm of RL fine-tuning of imitation-learned policies: when refining a pre-trained manipulation policy with RL, a unified critic risks suppressing the learned behavior through competing locomotion gradients. These findings demonstrate that critic architecture is a primary - and often overlooked - design choice in multi-objective humanoid RL, with greater impact than reward engineering on reaching efficiency.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

Authors:
Zhenhuan Liu↗Zhenyu Du↗Jens Eisert↗Zhenyu Cai↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Do Foundation Models See Biology? Evaluating Attention Coherence with Spatial Transcriptomics in Glioblastoma

Authors:
Dilakshan Srikanthan↗Amoon Jamzad↗Paul Wilson↗Nooshin Maghsoodi↗Robert Policelli↗Gabor Fichtinger↗John F. Rudan↗Parvin Mousavi↗

Whether attention maps from pathology foundation models capture genuine biology remains unknown, yet this question is critical for clinical trust and regulatory approval. We propose a spatial transcriptomics-based framework for orthogonal, hypothesis-free evaluation of attention and apply it to five pathology foundation models (CONCH v1.5, UNI v2, Virchow2, GigaPath, H-Optimus-1) and a ResNet50 baseline. Using attention-based multiple instance learning, we train single-task and multi-task models to predict five molecular alterations in glioblastoma on the CPTAC cohort, validate on an independent TCGA cohort, and evaluate biological coherence of attention maps against 87 transcriptional signatures using co-registered Visium spatial transcriptomics data from 18 samples. Internally, no single encoder dominates across all tasks, and external validation inverts internal performance rankings. Attention maps show a five-fold enrichment gradient from pathways (Cohen's d=0.329) to individual genes (d=0.055), indicating that attention captures emergent multi-gene transcriptional programs rather than individual molecular events. Spatially smooth attention maps do not imply biological coherence, and different encoders attend to distinct biological compartments. Our framework provides objective, quantitative assessment of what foundation models learn from histopathology, moving the field beyond qualitative saliency map review.

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22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

AliceDB database and pipeline for identification of natural protein variants based on mass spectrometry measurement data

Authors:
Thiel↗Rozycka↗Puchalski↗Oldziej↗

The natural variation that distinguishes living organisms within a single species is currently being studied intensively, primarily at the genetic level. Unfortunately, studies of natural variants at the level of protein gene products are not very common, mainly due to the lack of appropriate databases and bioinformatics tools. The main research technique used to study proteomes/peptidomes is mass spectrometry (MS). A classic method for interpreting raw mass spectrometry data in proteomic/peptidomic studies involves the use of databases containing representative (canonical) sequences that define the proteome of the organism under study. In this paper, we present the AliceDB database, which contains information on over 7 million natural variants of protein sequences described in the scientific literature for Homo sapiens. The data contained in the AliceDB database can be utilized using widely available and commonly used software for interpreting proteomic data. Test results regarding the use of the AliceDB database for the interpretation of proteomic data indicate that accounting for the presence of natural variants increases both the number and quality of identified proteins. Furthermore, it is easy to identify protein sequence variants that may, for example, be of significance in medicine.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

Authors:
Ali Rahimi↗Babak H. Khalaj↗Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali↗

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Authors:
Ziyi Chang↗Kanglei Zhou↗Xiaohui Liang↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Authors:
Nolan Koblischke↗Liam Parker↗Francois Lanusse↗Jo Bovy↗Irina Espejo↗Shirley Ho↗

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

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