Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

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

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

The Zeta Tail Distribution: A Novel Event-Count Model

arXiv:2506.17496v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Zeta Tail$\left(a\right)$ probability distribution as a new model for random damage-event counts in risk analysis. Although a natural analogue of the Geometric$\left(p\right)$ distribution, Zeta Tail$\left(a\right)$ has received little attention in the scholarly literature. In the present work, we show this distribution to be reasonably tractable by deriving various fundamental properties, including moments, generating functions, and reliability functions. We then assess its usefulness as an alternative to Geometric$\left(p\right)$, both theoretically and through application to a set of meteorological data. Finally, we discuss conceptual differences between employing the Zeta Tail$\left(a\right)$ model conditionally (i.e., given observed data with certain known characteristics) and unconditionally (i.e., for arbitrary, as yet unobserved data).

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Sol Video Inference Engine: Agent-Native Full-Stack Acceleration Framework for Efficient Video Generation

arXiv:2606.23743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern video diffusion models achieve higher generation quality through scaling, but this also increases inference cost. Although many acceleration methods have been proposed, a central challenge is that the most effective acceleration strategy is highly instance-specific: a recipe that works well for one combination of model, hardware, and inference configuration often does not transfer to another. Different models vary in architecture, numerical sensitivity, and attention concentration patterns. Inference settings differ in spatial and temporal resolution and video duration, while hardware platforms differ in memory hierarchy, supported numerical formats, and kernel throughput. These factors create a large tuning space, making manual performance engineering costly. We present Sol Video Inference Engine, an agentic, native, training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. It organizes five broadly applicable techniques, cache, sparse attention, token pruning, quantization, and kernel fusion, into an agentic acceleration stack for instance-specific optimization. For a concrete deployment target defined by a model, hardware platform, and serving configuration, parallel skill agents optimize the implementation of each technique, an agent integrator composes them into a global acceleration stack, and a human validator provides feedback on generation quality. We instantiate this workflow on three video models with different sizes and architectures: 64B Cosmos3-Super, 22B LTX-2.3, and 2B SANA-Video. With little human effort, the full stack achieves more than 2x end-to-end acceleration while maintaining near-lossless VBench quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the agent framework for video diffusion acceleration.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Dissecting model behavior through agent trajectories

arXiv:2606.17454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance is not just a modeling problem, it is fundamentally a systems problem. The advanced capabilities of models are realized through agent harnesses. Therefore, a gap between model assumptions and harness behavior can easily prevent the model's full capabilities from translating into agent performance. We formalize this as the `intent-execution' gap: the mismatch between what the model intends and what the harness executes, and vice versa. We argue that minimizing this intent-execution gap is as important as other aspects of harness design such as tools and execution loops. To illustrate the impact of this harness-model alignment, we develop a simple and customizable harness called `Simple Strands Agent' (SSA). SSA aims to find the bulk of common patterns which generalize across different model families (such as Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok, Qwen), as well as a small number of model-specific preferences. We make two contributions: (i) we $reproduce or improve on the pass@1$ performance reported by diverse model-provider families on popular agentic benchmarks (SWE-Pro, SWE-Verified and Terminal-Bench-2), and (ii) building on an $analysis of 138k trajectories generated by SSA$, we look beyond the $\texttt{pass@1}$ numbers which tend to be relatively even across frontier models. By representing agent trajectories in code state-spaces, we observe model-level differences in problem-solving behavior. Finer-grained metrics such as edit frequency, testing activity, and phase-transitions reveal how individual models allocate effort across different stages of autonomous problem solving.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal Shadow Estimation with Minimal Measurement Settings

arXiv:2606.20003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shadow estimation is a powerful framework for predicting quantum properties from randomized measurements. While $3$-design protocols achieve optimal worst-case performance, the minimal number of measurement bases required for such optimality has remained open. Here we prove that $\Theta(d^2)$ measurement bases are both necessary and sufficient for worst-case optimal shadow estimation and construct an explicit basis family. In stark contrast, any state $2$-design already suffices for average-case optimality: the mean squared shadow norm of normalized observables is bounded by a universal constant, and we prove strong concentration for Haar-random states, yielding constant sample complexity for generic pure-state fidelity estimation. Easily implementable $2$-designs – from mutually unbiased bases, cyclic measurements, or shallow $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-depth circuits – enable optimal average-case protocols with remarkably simple measurement strategies. Our results establish a fundamental complexity separation: worst-case estimation requires $\Theta(d^2)$ bases, whereas average-case performance requires only $\Theta(d)$ bases, with broad implications for quantum information theory and near-term experiments.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Explicit Solution of Infinite-Horizon Linear Backward Stochastic Volterra Integral Equations

arXiv:2603.15479v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study linear backward stochastic Volterra integral equations (BSVIEs) on the infinite time horizon. By introducing weighted function spaces with exponential decay, we establish existence and uniqueness of adapted M-solutions. We construct an infinite-horizon resolvent kernel and derive explicit formulas for the solution components (Y,Z,K) using a Girsanov transformation and Hida Malliavin calculus. The results extend the finite-horizon theory of Hu and Oksendal to the infinite horizon framework.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Perfect State Transfer on Quotient Graphs in Shunt Decomposition-Based Quantum Walks

arXiv:2606.24440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates perfect state transfer (PST) in discrete-time quantum walks constructed via the shunt decomposition method. The walks are defined on a graph $G$ and its associated quotient graph $G/\pi$, induced by an equitable partition $\pi$. Through the shunt decomposition of $G$, we derive an explicit relation between the shift operator of the parent graph $G$ and that of its quotient graph $G/\pi$. We construct a reflection operator based on the characteristic matrix, which establishes a connection between the transition operator of the parent graph and that of its lower-dimensional quotient graph. We then prove that PST occurs on $G$ if and only if it occurs on $G/\pi$. Furthermore, we express the unitary evolution operator of the quotient graph in terms of Chebyshev polynomials of the first kind, from which we derive explicit criteria for PST. As an application, we establish PST on the cycle graph $C_{n}$ at time $k = n/2$, and lift the result to the parent graph $C_{2n}$ via the equitable partition $\pi$. We further show that if an equitable partition $\pi$ of $G$ induces a quotient isomorphic to $K_n^{\circlearrowleft}$, the complete digraph on $n$ vertices with a loop at every vertex, then PST occurs at step $k = n$, and the walk is periodic at $k = 2n$. This framework is applied to two families of graphs, which are the complete bipartite digraph $K_{n,n}^{\rightleftharpoons}$ and the circulant graph $\operatorname{Circ}(2n, S)$, where $S$ consists of all odd residues modulo $2n$ and $n = 2^s$ for some $s \geq 1$, establishing PST in their respective line digraphs. Collectively, these results also answer the question posed by Godsil and Zhan concerning which shunt decompositions or embeddings of a graph admit PST.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Preferences of a Voice-First Nation: Large-Scale Pairwise Evaluation and Preference Analysis for TTS in Indian Languages

Crowdsourced pairwise evaluation has emerged as a scalable approach for assessing foundation models. However, applying it to Text to Speech(TTS) introduces high variance due to linguistic diversity and multidimensional nature of speech perception. We present a controlled multidimensional pairwise evaluation framework for multilingual TTS that combines linguistic control with perceptually grounded annotation. Using 5K+ native and code-mixed sentences across 10 Indic languages, we evaluate 7 state-of-the-art TTS systems and collect over 120K pairwise comparisons from over 1900 native raters. In addition to overall preference, raters provide judgments across 6 perceptual dimensions: intelligibility, expressiveness, voice quality, liveliness, noise, and hallucinations. Using Bradley-Terry modeling, we construct a multilingual leaderboard, interpret human preference using SHAP analysis and analyze leaderboard reliability alongside model strengths and trade-offs across perceptual dimensions.

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

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Optimal minimal residual disease threshold in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia: A retrospective cohort study based on the TARGET database

Authors:

by Xiong-yu Liao, Hong Zheng, Jian-pei Fang, Dun-hua Zhou, Kun-yin Qiu Background Minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring is a cornerstone of risk stratification in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML), with a threshold of 0.1% conventionally defining positivity by flow cytometry. Advances in flow cytometric technologies, enabling detection of leukemic cells with higher sensitivity and specificity, warrant a reevaluation of whether a lower threshold improves prognostic accuracy. Methods and findings We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET)-AML initiative. The study population comprised 1,205 pediatric patients with de novo AML treated across Children’s Oncology Group (COG) clinical trial centers. Patients were enrolled between September 1996 and December 2016, with a median follow-up of 6.2 years (range: 0.5–20.1 years). The primary objective was to compare the prognostic performance of the traditional MRD threshold (≥0.1%) with a lower threshold (≥0.05%) after induction courses 1 and 2. The main outcome measure was 5-year event-free survival (EFS). Analyses included Kaplan−Meier survival estimates, Cox proportional hazards models to calculate hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and net reclassification improvement (NRI). The optimal threshold for predicting 5-year EFS, determined by ROC analysis, was 0.05% after both induction course 1 (AUC: 0.840, 95%CI[0.76,0.88]) and course 2 (AUC: 0.854, 95%CI[0.78,0.89]). The 0.05% threshold demonstrated higher HR for the first event than the 0.1% threshold (after course 1: HR = 2.8, 95%CI[2.3,3.3]; P 

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

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics – the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay – and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, $L_0 \subsetneq \cdots \subsetneq L_4$, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified $L_0 \to L_1$ refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

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

On the Oracle Complexity of Interpolation-Based Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.19878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on first-order optimizers for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has suggested that smoothness of ERM loss functions in the training data, rather than in the optimization parameters, can be leveraged to improve the oracle complexity of gradient descent (GD) methods. In this paper, we propose an inexact gradient method, piecewise polynomial interpolation-based gradient descent (PPI-GD), which approximates the full gradient in each iteration by querying the first-order oracle at equidistant points in the data domain to construct polynomial interpolants of the resulting gradient samples over appropriately sized patches of the data domain. We analyze the oracle complexity of PPI-GD for strongly convex and non-convex loss functions when the data space dimension is bounded by a polylogarithmic function of the number of training samples, and find it to outperform several GD variants in key regimes when the loss function is sufficiently smooth. Furthermore, our analysis extends several techniques from the error analysis of bicubic spline interpolants to the setting of $d$-variate tensor product polynomial interpolants which may be of independent interest in interpolation analysis.

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

A Geometry-Informed Computer Vision Method for Detecting and Examining Overtaking Vehicles From A Bicycle

Instrumented bicycle studies have produced direct field evidence on vehicle passing behavior, but extracting overtaking events from continuous rear-facing video has remained dependent on manual, frame-by-frame annotation. This bottleneck constrains sample sizes and limits naturalistic cycling safety research. We present a geometry-informed computer vision pipeline that automates overtaking event detection from a single bicycle-mounted camera without multi-sensor configurations or explicit camera calibration. The system combines RT-DETR object detection with ByteTrack multi-object tracking through a three-stage geometric validation module enforcing bearing angle trend, apparent size growth, and spatial confirmation criteria derived from perspective projection principles. Validated on 315 manually annotated real-world overtaking events from urban roads in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the pipeline achieved 97.8% recall with zero false positives. The system identified overtaking intentions a mean of 2.44 seconds before vehicle passage, with 84.1% of events exceeding the 1.5-second human reaction time threshold, demonstrating feasibility for active cyclist warning. Lateral passing distance measurements from 96 events revealed 33.3% of passes below the 5-foot (152.4 cm) threshold, consistent with non-compliance rates in prior field and self-reported studies. A preliminary calibration-free lateral distance estimation approach using bounding box geometric features achieved mean absolute errors of 13-14 cm under leave-one-out cross-validation, sufficient to distinguish close passes from standard passes for safety categorization. By automating event isolation from consumer-grade footage, the system removes the primary annotation bottleneck of instrumented bicycle research and provides a scalable foundation for vehicle-bicycle interaction analysis across larger datasets and diverse urban environments.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

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

VQE as Initial State Preparation for QPE on Heisenberg Spin-Glass Hamiltonians

arXiv:2606.15061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) is the quantum algorithmic workhorse for computing ground state energies of quantum Hamiltonians with quantum computers. Ground state energy calculation of physical systems is perhaps the most promising use case for quantum computing in terms of scientific and commercial value with a plausible path to outperformance of classical alternatives. This path, however, hinges on the availability of initial states for QPE with significant overlap with the true ground state. Using extensive (classical) numerical computations, we study whether the NISQ-era algorithm VQE (Variational Quantum Eigensolver) could be used to efficiently prepare high-overlap states of disordered fully-connected anisotropic Heisenberg spin glass quantum Hamiltonians with up to $15$ qubits. We find that (i) – consistent with widely held, but rarely numerically illustrated beliefs – VQE is generally unable to efficiently converge to the ground state for our Hamiltonians, which is a well-known issue with VQE due to a variety of factors including vanishing gradients and local minima; (ii) low energy states do not necessarily have large ground-state overlap, but there is typically a correlation between the two measures; (iii) adding more than three layers to the VQE ansatz neither improves overlap nor the energies found; and (iv) the best-found overlap scaling as a function of the Hamiltonian system size is not strongly exponentially decreasing, suggesting potential for VQE to be a heuristic state preparation algorithm for QPE.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Not What, But How: A Framework for Auditing LLM Responses across Positioning, Generalization, Anthropomorphism, and Maxims

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits, and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ's applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.