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

An Integrable Token Mixing Layer from the Generalized Yang Baxter Equation

arXiv:2606.15085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The YB Mixer is a sequence token mixing layer derived from free fermion and generalized Yang Baxter structures. It applies a core principle from integrable systems where a local algebraic constraint guarantees global computational stability. By using the Ising exchange algebra the mixer creates a free fermionic structure that acts as an exactly norm preserving orthogonal map. This algebra also produces commuting transfer matrices which allow inference to be order free and adaptable to any variable budget. To ensure the model can generalize to longer sequence lengths it uses a spectral circulant generator. This generator maintains the crucial orthogonal and commuting properties of the system. The result is a highly stable and mathematically grounded architecture for sequence processing.

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

How Controlling the Variance can Improve Training Stability of Sparsely Activated DNNs and CNNs

arXiv:2602.05779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge-of-Chaos (EoC) theory developed for the random initialization of deep networks allows more efficient training by both preserving information in the initial outputs of the network and minimising exploding or vanishing gradients through characterisation of the intermediate layers as Gaussian processes. This EoC theory provides formulae for the choice of the initialisation distribution variances of the weights and biases. For activations which are approximately linear around the origin, the EoC theory typically encourages the Gaussian process variance to converge towards zero with increasing depth. Here we consider the less studied setting of highly sparsity inducing activations where a large region of values near the origin are set to zero. In this setting we prove a new phenomenon whereby initialisations leading to larger fixed Gaussian processes are beneficial to training stability. This theory informs a new, yet simple, initialisation strategy that allows training DNNs and CNNs with as large as 90\% sparsity in the hidden layers.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

The Circumplex Degeneracy Behind the Rare-Class Limit in Affect Recognition

In-the-wild expression recognition persistently fails on a few rare emotions, and the standard explanation is class imbalance. Through a controlled multi-task study on two benchmarks, we show the failure is instead a property of affect geometry: the rare classes are degenerate on Russell's circumplex, and that degeneracy bounds what any loss or cost can achieve. Our instrument is a circumplex-cost optimal-transport term that prices expression confusions by their valence-arousal distance. The term improves the official score and expression macro-F1, but a control most studies omit shows the gain is not geometric: a uniform cost, equivalent to a generic confidence penalty, matches it on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.625) and significantly exceeds it on AffectNet (+0.057 over base, larger than the circumplex). What the geometry reshapes is the structure of the errors, making them affectively nearer the truth on Aff-Wild2 (p=0.031 against the uniform control), an effect that does not survive on AffectNet, where a visual confound at the far corner of the circumplex overwhelms it. The rare-class failure, by contrast, is stable across both datasets we examine: the degenerate pairs (anger-fear on Aff-Wild2, anger-contempt on AffectNet) resist frequency-based interventions, the transport term, and an action-unit-augmented cost built specifically to separate them. We conclude that progress on rare expressions requires representations that distinguish the classes, not supervision that reprices their confusions, and we provide the controls and metrics needed to tell the two apart.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

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

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

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

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read–Write–Assess–Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Guiding Federated Graph Recommendation with LLM-encoded knowledge

arXiv:2606.15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user–item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy. However, aggregating graph representations across distributed, non-IID clients remains a challenge; structural embeddings learned locally often misalign, and naive averaging fails to capture meaningful cross-client relationships. Most existing federated graph methods rely exclusively on structural aggregation, neglecting the rich, global semantic context available in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses LLM-encoded knowledge to guide federated graph recommendation. Specifically, clients learn structural representations from local graphs while simultaneously summarizing their typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors via a frozen LLM. The central server then uses these LLM-encoded semantic signals to discover related preference patterns across clients, guiding the selective aggregation of their structural representations. This enables semantically informed cross-client collaboration without exposing raw data. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that guiding structural alignment with LLM-encoded knowledge consistently improves recommendation accuracy over existing federated graph baselines.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Trivariate Hypergeometric Series Formulas for Pure Partition Functions of Multiple $3$-SLE$_\kappa$

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure partition functions of multiple SLE are characterized by null-state partial differential equations, Möbius covariance, and boundary asymptotics. After quotienting by Möbius covariance, the case of three curves is the first genuinely multivariable one: the moduli space has three independent variables, naturally represented by the three unoriented cross-ratios of the three pairs of links. We solve this Möbius-normalized three-variable problem for the two basic link-pattern types of multiple \(3\)-SLE\(_\kappa\), namely the rainbow and neighbor patterns. Writing \(\beta=4/\kappa\), we construct explicit trivariate hypergeometric-series normal forms and identify them with the corresponding pure partition functions for all \(\beta>1/2\) in the rainbow case and all \(\beta\ge2/3\) in the neighbor case. Equivalently, these ranges are \(\kappa\in(0,8)\) and \(\kappa\in(0,6]\), respectively. The proof is analytic. The null-state PDEs and Möbius covariance yield recursion relations for the trivariate coefficient arrays. In the rainbow case, coefficient estimates give convergence and boundary regularity on the closed cube. In the neighbor case, Pfaff systems continue the local power series to a neighborhood of \([0,1)^3\), while side-face equations, regular normal estimates, and corner propagation give continuity on \([0,1]^3\) for \(\beta\ge2/3\). The endpoint \(\beta=2/3\), corresponding to \(\kappa=6\), requires a logarithmic normal term. The two-dimensional boundary degenerations are classical Appell \(F_1\) and Horn \(G_2\) functions. The probabilistic identification uses SLE martingale arguments and Itô calculus, together with positivity and boundary regularity. We also discuss boundary degenerations, including heuristic connections with boundary Green's functions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

CogGen: Cognitive-Load-Inspired Fully Unsupervised Deep Generative Modeling for Compressively Sampled MRI Reconstruction

arXiv:2603.04438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fully unsupervised deep generative modeling (FU-DGM) offers significant potential for compressively sampled magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) reconstruction. Representative FU-DGM formulations, such as deep image prior (DIP) and implicit neural representation (INR), employ architectural bias to induce a low-dimensional manifold in the image space that aligns with the forward observation. However, as the underlying inverse system is highly ill-posed, prolonged iterative fitting in FU-DGM typically leads to poor efficiency and noise amplification. In this paper, guided by the cognitive principle of easy-to-hard learning, we propose CogGen, an FU-DGM framework that reformulates CS-MRI reconstruction as a staged inversion problem. Specifically, CogGen implements an self-paced curriculum learning (SPCL)-driven progressive scheduling strategy through an MRI-aware dual-threshold weighting criterion, which adaptively regulates k-space measurement participation. The data-consistency residual thresholding evaluates the fitting reliability of the current generator, while the k-space radius thresholding controls stage-wise measurement exposure, thereby avoiding uniform fitting throughout optimization. Theoretically, our analysis shows that, when early stages favor easy-to-fit measurements, CogGen yields a reduced local sufficient-iteration bound and a smaller cumulative noise-amplification bound, explaining the improved convergence behavior and reconstruction fidelity of CogGen within a finite iteration budget. Numerical experiments demonstrate that both CogGen instantiations, CogGen-DIP and CogGen-INR, achieve superior performance over prevailing CS-MRI reconstruction techniques, including unsupervised and supervised pipelines.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

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

Abstraction in Style: Beyond Texture and Color

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

EM-NeSy: Expectation Maximization for Neurosymbolic Learning

arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

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

OCOO-T : A Simple and Scalable Virtual Cell Model for Transcriptional Perturbation Response Prediction

arXiv:2606.12838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

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

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.19069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper compares the performance of model-free controllers on a nonlinear system under cyberattacks, including false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. Four RL reward types are analyzed for accuracy, cost, and resilience. Results show that the Lyapunov reward offers the best resilience with low tracking error. Exponential mode also provides good trade-offs with acceptable resilience under moderate training conditions. Progressive and linear rewards converge faster but are less robust. RL-MPCs show strong steady-state resilience but require longer training times; RL-PID controllers are faster with significantly less training time. Proximal Policy Optimization outperforms Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with a significant reduction in KPI variance. This study serves to highlight how well-designed RL rewards can improve performance and resilience against cyber threats.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Secondary terms for first moments of Selmer groups of twists of elliptic curves over global function fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $E$ be a non-isotrivial elliptic curve over a global function field $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$ of characteristic coprime to $2$ and $3$. Under some explicit conditions, we determine the secondary terms for the first moments of prime Selmer groups of cyclic prime twist families of $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q(t)$.

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

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Robust integration of weakly anchored spatial multi-omics

Spatial multi-omics holds great promise for dissecting complex biological processes, though inherent technical constraints continue to limit its widespread adoption. Currently, most studies therefore measure distinct omics features on separate tissue sections, necessitating spatial diagonal integration. An emerging practical solution is to leverage hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images as an integration anchor, given their ubiquity, low cost, and compatibility across tissue preparations. However, this anchor is frequently compromised in real-world settings by variations in H&E staining style, absence of reliable histological landmarks, and mismatches in spatial resolutions across omics modalities. To address this, we introduce SpaWeaver, a computational framework that couples a pathology foundation model with a graph Transformer and a latent feature aligner module, providing a highly robust solution for weakly anchored spatial omics data diagonal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaWeaver exhibits superior robustness against isolated or synergistic weak-anchoring factors. The spatial multi-omics profiles generated by SpaWeaver link molecular features originally separated on two sections, unlocking diverse downstream analyses once exclusive to co-assayed spatial multi-omics data, including niche-aware cell-cell communication inference and multi-omics resolved cell state. In this study, it unveils tumor-distance-dependent fibroblast-CD4+ T-cell signaling in human colon adenocarcinoma and identifies a hypoxic glycolytic tumor state with pyknotic nuclei in human ovarian cancer. Overall, our approach bridges readily accessible single-omics measurements across weakly anchored tissue sections, enabling unified spatial multi-omics characterization and system-level tissue analysis.

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

SUP-MCRL: Subject-aware Unified Pseudo-feature Coded Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG Visual Decoding

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces suffer severe fidelity degradation in neural visual decoding when generalizing to natural visual experiences. Conventional multimodal contrastive representation learning solely optimizes geometric distance alignment, neglecting semantic consistency and subject selectivity, causing spurious zero-shot alignment. We propose SUP-MCRL, a unified framework integrating three collaborative mechanisms: (1) Semantic-entity Aware Visual Encoder (SAVE), learning spatial attention to extract semantic content without pre-trained saliency models; (2 Unified EEG Enhancer (UEE), employing multi-scale atrous convolutions and inter-band attention for adaptive cross-subject robustness; and (3) Prototype-based Progressive Augmenter (PPA), maintaining an EMA-updated pseudo-feature pool to prevent representation collapse. Zero-shot experiments on THINGS-EEG achieve 66.0%/91.9% (Top-1/Top-5) intra-subject and 24.0%/52.9% LOSO accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/SUP-MCRL.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental quantum state learning with pairs of photons

arXiv:2606.16932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tomography allows one to estimate the density matrix describing the state an ensemble of quantum systems are prepared in (for example, polarization tomography determines the polarization state of a beam of identically prepared photons). In general, it is not possible to uniquely decompose the density matrix into its pure state components. Agarwal et al. proposed a protocol which, for a mixture composed of any two pure states of a qubit (with arbitrary probabilities), allows an observer to infer not only the density matrix but the identity of those specific pure states and their weights - the additional requirement being that the qubits arrive in pairs, where both qubits in each pair are in the same state. We experimentally demonstrate this learning-from-pairs concept using photons in the polarization degree of freedom. We use tomography to measure a sequence of single photons and make use of their time-of-arrival information to 'pair up' the photons after the measurement. From here we are able to infer the photons' polarization states and their respective probabilities, and we demonstrate this for various different choices of polarization states and ratios. Finally, we investigate our ability to discriminate between two equal mixtures of distinct pairs of orthogonal polarization states. We find that on the order of approx. 10e4 photons is typically enough to achieve tomography fidelities of approximately 0.9999. This is sufficient to discriminate between two different preparations of the same mixed state, differing by angles of less than 5 degrees between the pure states used in the two preparations.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Convex Approximation of Two-Layer ReLU Networks for Hidden State Differential Privacy

arXiv:2407.04884v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The hidden state threat model of differential privacy (DP) assumes that the adversary has access only to the final trained machine learning (ML) model, without seeing intermediate states during training. However, the current privacy analyses under this model are restricted to convex optimization problems, reducing their applicability to multi-layer neural networks, which are essential in modern deep learning applications. Notably, the most successful applications of the hidden state privacy analyses in classification tasks have only been for logistic regression models. We demonstrate that it is possible to privately train convex problems with privacy-utility trade-offs comparable to those of 2-layer ReLU networks trained with DP stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). This is achieved through a stochastic approximation of a dual formulation of the ReLU minimization problem, resulting in a strongly convex problem. This enables the use of existing hidden state privacy analyses and provides accurate privacy bounds also for the noisy cyclic mini-batch gradient descent (NoisyCGD) method with fixed disjoint mini-batches. Empirical results on benchmark classification tasks demonstrate that NoisyCGD can achieve privacy-utility trade-offs on par with DP-SGD applied to 2-layer ReLU networks.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

Authors:

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.