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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

PermaVid: Consistent Video Generation Across Edits via Disentangled Context Memory

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Analysis of 173,303 exomes and genomes in the Pakistan Genome Resource

Naturally occurring loss-of-function variants in human genes enable drug target discovery because they mimic pharmacological inhibition of proteins. However, the study of these genetic variants is constrained by their rarity. Sequencing of diverse populations, particularly those enriched in familial relatedness, has been postulated to promote discovery of rare genetic variants1–3. Here we present the Pakistan Genome Resource, a South Asian biobank with high familial relatedness comprising 173,303 participants, who collectively carry naturally occurring homozygous loss-of-function variants in 6,476 genes. We describe the genetic architecture of this population, associations between genes and biomarkers, the distribution of loss-of-function variants across molecular pathways, and recall-by-genotype studies of therapeutically relevant genes. The Pakistan Genome Resource expands the catalogue of human genetic variants, provides a comprehensive genetic reference resource for the Pakistani population, and demonstrates the value of studying diverse cohorts to advance human health. The Pakistan Genome Resource compiles biobank data from 173,303 individuals with high familial relatedness, broadening the catalogue of human genetic variation and establishing a population-specific genomic reference for Pakistan.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SMART: A Flexible, Interpretable, and Scalable Spatio-temporal Brain Atlas from High-Resolution Imaging Data

We introduce SMART, a framework for learning a flexible, interpretable, and scalable spatio-temporal brain atlas from longitudinal high-resolution 3D medical images. Existing approaches to spatio-temporal atlas construction rely on black-box generative models that lack flexibility, limit interpretability, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional data. SMART addresses these challenges by learning a continuous disease-time atlas that decouples global group-wise disease dynamics from their patient-specific anatomical manifestation. Guided by anatomically inspired priors, SMART models interpretable global trajectories of regional progression along a shared disease timeline through region-specific differential equations. Global trajectories are further personalized to individual anatomies via dense diffeomorphic displacements parameterized by a flexible and scalable multi-scale Neural Cellular Automata. Evaluated on five longitudinal MRI datasets in Alzheimer's disease (ADNI-1/GO/2, OASIS-3, AIBL; > 1,300 subjects), SMART produces anatomically meaningful predictions of disease progression and achieves state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy and improved temporal consistency over adversarial and diffusion baselines. Our approach establishes a new paradigm for flexible, interpretable, and scalable modeling of spatio-temporal change in high-dimensional medical image time-series.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Do We Really Need Diffusion? A Fast U-Net for Paired Medical Image Translation

Magnetic resonance imaging-signal fat fraction (MRI-SFF) quantifies tissue fat and serves as an established biomarker for metabolic and musculoskeletal disorders. The acquisition requires, however, specialized MRI sequences, which are not available routinely. We investigate whether SFF can be estimated from widely available T2-weighted (T2w) MRI via image-to-image translation (I2I). We further compare a lightweight 4-level U-Net to a state-of-the-art Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) using a dataset of 230 048 paired 2D images (183 517 train, 23 621 val, 22 910 test) from the German National Cohort (NAKO). Both models clearly outperform the identity baseline (Pearson correlation r = 0.769, mean absolute error MAE = 0.070 +/- 0.054), which confirms that the models learn a non-trivial cross-modal mapping. Interestingly, the lightweight U-Net outperforms the DDPM in both correlation (r = 0.975 vs. 0.962) and error (MAE = 0.014 +/- 0.015 vs. 0.019 +/- 0.019), while reducing inference time by a factor of 208 (25.2 ms vs. 5 227.2 ms per image using 50 Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) steps). The strong clinical performance at substantially reduced computational cost enables real-time clinical use.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Counterintuitive problems in discrete probability

arXiv:2606.07516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This manuscript contains a collection of counterintuitive problems in discrete probability, together with detailed solutions. The dataset was constructed as part of a broader research project investigating the capabilities of the latest-generation Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving discrete probability problems, in order to assess whether LLMs tend to make systematic reasoning errors associated with known cognitive biases. The problems collected here are specifically designed to challenge heuristic reasoning strategies that often lead to intuitively appealing but mathematically incorrect conclusions. The dataset combines several types of problems. Some are adapted from classical probabilistic paradoxes and cognitive-bias literature, while others originate from recreational mathematics sources or were developed by ourselves following similar principles. The primary purpose of this document is to provide a transparent and publicly accessible reference for the problems used in our experimental evaluation of language models, as well as providing detailed human-made solutions. At the same time, we believe that this collection may also prove useful for future research on probabilistic reasoning, cognitive biases, and the evaluation of reasoning capabilities in artificial intelligence systems.

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

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bistable by Construction: Wall-Clock-Calibrated State Monitors Have No Moment-Detection Regime at Agent Cadence

arXiv:2606.19386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. Real agent runs measure latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s); real coding cadence sits inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Computing Algebra (QCA), the theory and implementation

arXiv:2606.17621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a real geometric algebra framework designed for the direct translation of the Dirac formalism into geometric algebra representations. Unlike previous approaches based on positive-definite signatures, QCA employs a split-signature construction that enables a natural realization of quantum states and operators while simplifying computational implementation. We further present an implementation of QCA using the GAALOP software and show how quantum gates and multi-qubit systems can be efficiently represented and generated computationally. As an application, we demonstrate the use of QCA in quantum game theory, where the real-algebraic formulation provides computational advantages for modeling entangled strategies and quantum interactions. The proposed framework establishes a practical bridge between the abstract formalism of quantum computation and efficient geometric algebra implementations.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

RLCSD: Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive On-Policy Self-Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense, token-level supervision for reasoning models by aligning a model's own distribution with the distribution it produces under privileged context, typically a verified solution. However, we show that the learning signal drawn from this distributional gap concentrates on style tokens rather than task-bearing ones, as the hinted model tends to produce more direct, shorter outputs. We term this pathology privilege-induced style drift, which destabilizes training or causes response length to shrink. To address this, we propose RLCSD (Reinforcement Learning with Contrastive on-policy Self-Distillation), which mitigates this drift by contrasting the teacher-student gap under a correct hint against that under a wrong hint, suppressing the style shift that conditioning on a hint tends to induce regardless of correctness, and yielding a signal that is more concentrated on task-bearing tokens. Experiments on Qwen3 (1.7B/4B/8B) and Olmo-3-7B-Think across mathematical and logical reasoning show that RLCSD consistently outperforms GRPO and prior OPSD methods. We further show that the contrastive principle is general: it plugs into existing OPSD methods to improve them, and its underlying insight extends to the broader cross-model on-policy distillation setting.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Reliability of Probabilistic Emulation of Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.12997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two dominant approaches have emerged for generating probabilistic forecasts of physical systems: generative models, such as diffusion or flow matching; and ensembles of deterministic models with stochasticity injected, trained using the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) loss. While both approaches have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, the reliability of their uncertainties has not been systematically assessed. We address this gap by developing a framework to evaluate both approaches across diverse 2D spatiotemporal physical systems, under matched model size and computational budget. We assess the reliability of probabilistic emulation by inspecting the empirical coverage of predictive intervals, while also considering accuracy and computational efficiency metrics. CRPS-trained ensembles typically achieve more reliable uncertainties on both single-step prediction and autoregressive rollouts, demonstrating better coverage than the standard alternative of training generative models in a latent space. Moreover, the CRPS approach offers significantly faster inference. When generative models are trained in ambient rather than a compressed latent space, which is often infeasible for high-dimensional problems, they exhibit comparable coverage to CRPS-trained ensembles, though with substantially larger inference latency. In contrast, when CRPS-trained ensembles are trained in latent space they do not show a marked degradation in coverage with respect to ambient space. Both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles demonstrate good predictive accuracy. To facilitate future research and application, we release AutoCast, a modular framework implementing both generative models and CRPS-trained ensembles, alongside AutoSim, a flexible dataset generation package for rapid prototyping.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On the Addressability Problem on CSS Codes

arXiv:2502.13889v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent discoveries in asymptotically good quantum codes have intensified research on their application in quantum computation and fault-tolerant operations. This study focuses on the addressability problem within CSS codes: we ask what circuits might implement logical gates on strict subsets of logical qubits. With some notion of fault-tolerance, we prove several impossibility results: for CSS codes with non-zero rate, one cannot address a logical $H$, $HS$, $SH$, or $\mathsf{CNOT}$ to any non-empty strict subset of logical qubits using a circuit made only from 1-local Clifford gates. Furthermore, we show that one cannot permute the logical qubits in a code purely by permuting the physical qubits, if the rate of the code is (asymptotically) greater than 1/3 and the distance is at least 3. We can show a similar no-go result for $\mathsf{CNOT}$s and $\mathsf{CZ}$s between two such high-rate codes, albeit under a more restrictive assumption on the circuit, which we call "global" (though recent addressable CCZ gates use global circuits). This work pioneers the study of distance-preserving addressability in quantum codes, mainly by considering automorphisms of the code. This perspective offers new insights and potential directions for future research. We argue that studying this trade off between addressability and efficiency of the codes is essential to understand better how to do efficient quantum computation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference

Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Theory of Training Profit-Optimal LLMs

arXiv:2605.16430v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling LLMs requires tremendous computational resources, and recent advances in AI have gone hand in hand with massive amounts of capital expenditure. While it is established that scaling up LLMs reliably increases model quality (quantified in terms of loss or downstream evaluations), it is unclear how these quality improvements translate to potential revenue, and whether revenue increases would offset costs of larger-scale training and inference. In this work, we develop an economic model for characterizing the rational behavior of an LLM training firm by combining scaling laws with microeconomic theory. Under our model of firm behavior, LLM quality can be increased with more parameters and training tokens, leading to more potential adoption by consumers, who each have a quality threshold for using the LLM. On the other hand, additional parameters and training tokens both incur additional costs. We analyze the profit maximization problem for this model under compute-bound and data-bound regimes. In the compute-bound regime, optimal model size and token budget track hardware efficiency $E$ (FLOPs/\$) at a near-linear rate; total training cost then scales sub-quadratically in $E$. Data efficiency improvements incentivize larger models and training expenditure. When we are limited to $D$ data, profit-optimal training expenditure scales as $D^2/E$, i.e, increase with data and decreases with hardware efficiency (as well as data efficiency). Finally, we analyze practical trends in training expenditure: current trends are consistent with our most permissive model variants in the compute-bound regime, but are not profit-optimal in the data-bound regime or assuming hardware advances will stall. Overall, our results provide a theory of profit-optimal LLM training, providing a foundation for engaging critically with industry statements and supporting long-term economic decision making.

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

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Matrix Discrepancy for Representations of Finite Groups

arXiv:2606.12181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a finite group $G$, we prove that there exist signs $\varepsilon\in\{\pm1\}^G$ such that $$\left\| \sum_{g\in G} \varepsilon_g\rho(g) \right\|\leq C\, \sqrt{|G|},$$ where $\rho$ is the left regular representation of $G$, and $C$ is a universal constant. This special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture was posed in [BKMZ24], where it was established for simple groups.

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

Task-Instructed Causal Routing of Vision Foundation Models for Multi-Task Learning

Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated strong robustness and transferability across a wide range of visual tasks. However, each model typically encodes strong inductive biases shaped by its pre-training objective and data domain, resulting in fragmented yet complementary visual knowledge. As a result, a single model often struggles to capture the diverse visual representations required across multiple dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TIGER (Task-Instruction-Guided Expert Routing), a framework that coordinates multiple heterogeneous VFMs for multi-task dense prediction. Instead of naively aggregating expert features, TIGER leverages natural-language task instructions to guide a routing network that assigns token-level expert weights conditioned on task semantics, enabling adaptive integration of complementary expert features. TIGER further introduces a counterfactual loss that aligns routing decisions with each expert's causal contribution by measuring prediction changes when experts are excluded, encouraging more reliable and interpretable routing. We evaluate TIGER on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and Pascal Context, where it consistently outperforms recent multi-task learning baselines while keeping all VFMs frozen. These results demonstrate that combining instruction-guided expert routing with counterfactual causal alignment enables effective coordination of heterogeneous vision foundation models.

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

Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation

We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliable, semantically aligned interaction with external data services. The modular framework is portable across platforms through API schema substitution and supports applications in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and climate analysis. It establishes a scalable interface between user intent and geospatial infrastructure, enabling streamlined and automated Earth observation workflows. Preliminary experiments under adversarial multi-turn settings show that prompt-level safety instructions improve robustness, although rare high-impact failures persist in API manipulation scenarios and highlight the need for adaptive, system-level defenses that balance safety, usability, and cost efficiency, which motivates the use of our intercept-level Guardrail agent.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Cutoff for asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mechanical shuffler consists of $m$ shelves. A deck of $n$ cards, arranged in increasing order, is dealt from the bottom sequentially. Each card is assigned a shelf uniformly at random and placed on the top (bottom) of the existing pile with probability $p$ ($1-p$) independently. We refer to this as asymmetric shelf-shuffle. We find the law $\nu_{n, m}^{(p)}$ of the permutation induced by the asymmetric shelf-shuffle and show that the pair consisting of the number of descents and the number of valleys is a sufficient statistic. This generalizes a result of Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes (Ann. Appl. Prob., 2013) corresponding to the case $p=1/2$. For $p=1/2$, Chen and Ottolini (ECP, 2025) established the cutoff in the total variation distance near $\lfloor n^{5/4}\rfloor$. We establish the cutoff for the asymmetric shelf shuffle. Let $\nu_n$ be the uniform measure on the set of all permutations $S_n$ of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a fixed $p\neq 1/2$ and $c>0$, we show that \[\operatorname{TV}\left(\nu_{n, \lfloor cn^{3/2}\rfloor }^{(p)}, \nu_n\right)=1-2\Phi\left(-\frac{|2p-1|}{4\sqrt{3}c}\right)+O_{c, p}(n^{-1/2})\;.\] We also establish the cutoff in the separation distance near $m\approx n^{2}$ and in the relative entropy near $m=n^{3/2}$. In both cases, we also obtain the cutoff profile explicitly.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

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

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504.15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on. We report two things. First, a practical recipe: a three-epoch QLoRA fine-tune of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (4-bit NF4, LoRA rank 16, via Unsloth) completed across two free-tier 16 GB GPUs (Tesla P100 then T4) by checkpointing only the small LoRA adapter (41.9M parameters) and resuming on the second machine. Adapter-only handoff is sufficient – optimizer and scheduler state need not be transferred – so the binding constraint is per-step VRAM and per-session wall-clock, not aggregate compute. Second, and more importantly, an honest evaluation that returns a cautionary result. On a blind held-out comparison against the un-fine-tuned base model, the fine-tuned model scored higher on similarity to the synthetic training distribution (BERTScore F1 +0.063, a fidelity not quality signal) but lower on advising quality: a blind LLM-as-judge preferred the base model on 46% of prompts versus 18%, and a source-verified factuality audit found four confident errors from the fine-tuned model on policy-sensitive topics against zero for the base. Auditing the training data with the same method, we find this is not a fine-tuning artifact: each audited error is already present in the Gemini-generated training answers, and a random-sample audit finds verifiable errors in a sizable fraction of responses (28-40%; single-judge, n=40). The data is therefore sufficient to account for the errors, which we attribute to the synthetic-data pipeline rather than the adapter-handoff method. We release the dataset, adapter, cross-GPU notebooks, and full evaluation harness so every result reproduces on a single 16 GB GPU.

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.