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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Decoding Insect Song: A Multitask Semisupervised Orthoptera Bioacoustic Classifier

arXiv:2606.13236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring holds great promise for ecological inference, yet existing automated tools are typically narrowly trained and non-transferable. We address these limitations with PULSE, a semi-supervised, multi-task framework for Orthoptera bioacoustics, combining weakly-supervised species classification, self-supervised learning on unlabelled field audio, and knowledge distillation from a general-purpose bioacoustic model. Our domain-adapted specialist model outperforms a state-of-the-art general model across all metrics (macro F1: 0.21 vs. 0.07; AUC: 0.74 vs. 0.45; AP: 0.32 vs. 0.19), with active learning further raising F1 to 0.34 and AUC to 0.84. Beyond classification, the learned embeddings encode ecologically meaningful structure, exposed through an interactive visualisation tool for ecological discovery.

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

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process Modelling for Expensive Quantum Systems with Heteroskedastic Noise

arXiv:2606.11240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate modeling of quantum many-body systems often requires computationally expensive simulations such as Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) or Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations. These methods, while precise, impose significant time and resource constraints, limiting their use in exhaustive parameter exploration. Moreover, these expensive simulations can contain variable errors over the large unknown parameter space, which needs to be quantified and propagated. Thus, predictive modelling is required to estimate the functional space accurately over scarcely sampled data with heteroskedastic noise, while preserving the physical relevance of the estimation. Therefore, we present a Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process (pc-EGP) framework designed to efficiently model complex and noisy quantum systems under physical consistency constraints. The proposed method first enforces physical constraints as a user controlled weighted penalty to the data-driven loss function of the Gaussian Process (GP) surrogates. Then an ensemble of such GP models is trained with variable noisy simulations via numerical quadrature method where these multiple GP(s) at different nodes is integrated as a quadrature weighted average. We first demonstrate the framework on synthetically generated data before applying to quantum systems. In the first case study, we leverage DMRG simulations of the Bose-Hubbard Model to predict the critical interaction parameter Uc governing the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator transition. In the second case study, we demonstrate our method on QMC simulations, of a quantum liquid confined inside a nanoporous silicate with the goal of optimizing a chemical environment to realize a one-dimensional superfluid. Compared to conventional GP, pc-EGP achieves a better balance of accuracy and physically meaningful predictions.

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

Two Wrongs, No Right: Auditing Social-Desirability Bias in LLM Annotators for Computational Social Science

Authors:

LLM annotators are increasingly used in computational social science (CSS), but it is unclear whether their alignment-shaped errors preserve the empirical conclusions a researcher would report. We audit three open-source 7B instruction-tuned models (Zephyr, Mistral-Instruct, Qwen2.5-Instruct) across six TweetEval tasks under four prompt conditions (72 cells) and find that social-desirability failures do not run in a single direction. Zephyr exhibits leniency bias, systematically under-applying harmful labels (offensive language: false benign rate 0.729, false alarm rate 0.031). Mistral and Qwen exhibit overcorrection, over-applying the same labels (Mistral hate-speech FAR = 0.604). All three models exhibit neutrality bias on abortion stance, underestimating opposition prevalence by 24 to 40 percentage points and inflating the neutral label. None of the four prompting interventions we test (neutral, safety framing, depersonalized, chain-of-thought) corrects these failures across models; safety framing can worsen stance distortion. Strikingly, Zephyr's hate-speech prevalence estimate matches the gold rate exactly while its class-conditional errors are large in both directions, an accidental cancellation that misleads aggregate validation. We translate these patterns into a three-part taxonomy with diagnostic FBR/FAR signatures and a lightweight gold-sample validation protocol. The headline for trustworthy CSS: a model that looks calibrated on aggregate metrics can still flip the substantive empirical conclusion a researcher would report.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Fine-Grained Image Tasks: From Evaluation to Diagnosis

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. While numerous benchmarks have evaluated LVLMs from holistic or task-specific perspectives, their capabilities on fine-grained image tasks-fundamental to computer vision-remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we introduce FG-BMK, a comprehensive fine-grained evaluation benchmark containing 1.01 million questions and 0.28 million images, covering diverse scenarios from common object-centric domains to specialized domains. FG-BMK jointly evaluates dialogue-level fine-grained semantic recognition and feature-level visual discriminability through human-oriented and machine-oriented paradigms, enabling diagnostic analysis of whether LVLM failures arise from insufficient visual representations, weak visual-to-semantic grounding, or limited fine-grained knowledge. Through extensive experiments on a diverse set of representative LVLMs/VLMs, we find that current LVLMs remain inadequate fine-grained recognizers, with failures arising from intertwined bottlenecks in visual representations, semantic grounding, modality alignment, and category-level knowledge. We further analyze training design factors for improving fine-grained capabilities and examine how visual and linguistic perturbations affect LVLM predictions. These findings provide diagnostic insights into the limitations of current LVLMs and offer guidance for future data construction and model design in developing more reliable LVLMs for fine-grained visual tasks. Our code is open-source and available at https://fg-bmk.github.io/.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

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

DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptation

Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (4D-POT). We revisit the underlying representation and model 3D features as a sparse set of feature-bearing Gaussians. These act as dynamic, volume-oriented keypoints that enable spatially continuous, distance-weighted aggregation of multi-view features before being splatted into a voxel grid for decoding. This point-centric formulation enables flexible, data-dependent receptive fields and long-range spatial interactions that are difficult to capture with local and dense voxel-based operators. A hierarchical Gaussian representation further enables multi-scale reasoning by combining global context from coarse super-points with fine-grained detail from higher-resolution streams. Extensive experiments on Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for 4D-POT. We provide code and models at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.

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

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Integrating national forest inventory, airborne lidar, and satellite imagery for wall-to-wall mapping of forest structure with computer vision

arXiv:2606.20291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remote sensing is increasingly relied upon to deliver actionable science for forest and wildfire risk management across large landscapes. Wall-to-wall, annually updated maps are a persistent need for effective forest management. Many planning systems and data collections combine disparate data sources with different purposes, vintages, and prediction quality, which leads to confounding behavior in operational planning systems. We introduce the VibrantForests framework, developed and applied to map forest attributes and provide a coherent foundation for effective forest and wildfire planning. VibrantForests includes a satellite-based forest structure model trained on lidar-derived samples and applied across the contiguous United States to concurrently generate estimates of canopy cover, canopy height, aboveground live tree biomass, basal area, and quadratic mean diameter at 10-meter resolution. We demonstrate predictive capability spanning the full spectrum of forest conditions ranging from sparse-canopy/low-biomass to dense-canopy/high-biomass. Results show that our model extends the range at which saturation is commonly encountered in comparable passive-sensor models, and reduces regression-to-mean behavior that commonly produces overestimation of forest attributes in small/sparse conditions and underestimation in large/dense conditions. The VibrantForests framework addresses a key limitation in large-area forest and wildfire planning by delivering coherent wall-to-wall estimates of management-relevant attributes at annual cadence and 10m resolution.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SIGMA: Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for Agentic Mathematical Reasoning

Solving mathematical reasoning problems requires not only accurate access to relevant knowledge but also careful, multi-step thinking. However, current retrieval-augmented models often rely on a single perspective, follow inflexible search strategies, and struggle to effectively combine information from multiple sources. We introduce SIGMA (Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for AGentic Mathematical reAsoning), a unified framework that orchestrates specialized agents to independently reason, perform targeted searches, and synthesize findings through a moderator mechanism. Each agent generates hypothetical passages to optimize retrieval for its analytic perspective, ensuring knowledge integration is both context-sensitive and computation-efficient. When evaluated on challenging benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME, and PhD-level science QA GPQA, SIGMA consistently outperforms both open- and closed-source systems, achieving an absolute performance improvement of 7.4%. Our results demonstrate that multi-agent, on-demand knowledge integration significantly enhances both reasoning accuracy and efficiency, offering a scalable approach for complex, knowledge-intensive problem-solving. We will release the code upon publication.

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

Active Learning with Low-Rank Structure for Data Selection

arXiv:2606.16045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

OmniPath Metabo: chemical structures, interactions and mechanisms to study the metabolome

Mechanistic and functional analysis of omics data largely relies on the incorporation of prior knowledge; however, connecting metabolomics data and knowledge is a major methodological challenge. This is largely driven by the diverse prior knowledge being fragmented across many databases requiring the merging of different database records across chemical structures, identifiers, and varying levels of structural specificity. Hence, this limits mechanistic interpretation and functional characterisation of the metabolome. Here, we present OmniPath Metabo, a comprehensive, harmonized, metabolome-centric database covering metabolites, lipids, food-derived compounds, and small molecule drugs, along with their associated receptors, transporters, enzymes, reactions, allosteric regulators, and disease associations. OmniPath Metabo harmonizes attributes using controlled vocabularies and ontologies, structures and built-in cheminformatics to map identifiers and track ambiguity. OmniPath Metabo is built directly from 40+ original resources and is freely accessible via an interactive web app and API at metabo.omnipathdb.org. OmniPath Metabo enables dynamic, context-specific construction of subnetworks to serve dedicated purposes, such as cell-cell communication or integrated multi-omics metabolite-driven regulation, connecting reactions, allosteric regulation, metabolite-receptor and metabolite-transporter interactions. Combining it with the over 170 other resources in OmniPath, it can be used for integrated networks of signaling, gene regulation, and metabolism. We showcase the application of OmniPath Metabo by analysing publicly available metabolomics data of lung cancer cell lines and metabolic footprints to mutational patterns. In summary, OmniPath Metabo transforms fragmented resources into a harmonised prior knowledge framework for a mechanistic and functional analysis of the metabolome.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Matching Markets meet Cumulative Prospect Theory: Towards Optimal and Adversarially Robust Learning

arXiv:2606.19883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in the competitive setup with two-sided matching markets under a human centric decision making model. To capture human preferences, we use cumulative prospect theory (CPT) that weighs the actions of the agent in a nonlinear fashion using a ($\alpha$-Hölder continuous) weight function. CPT has been widely used in behavioral economics and risk sensitive machine learning to emulate human preferences. We analyze the state-of-the-art learning algorithm with CPT weight distorted rewards and obtain a player optimal regret of $\mathcal{O}(K\log T \left(\frac{1}{\Delta}\right)^{2/\alpha})$, where $K$ denotes the number of arms, $T$ is the learning horizon, and $\Delta$ represents (suitably defined) players' minimum preference gap. Noticing the dependence on $\Delta$ to be sub-optimal, we further improve this regret by judiciously selecting the active set of arms during exploration, which removes the dependence on $K$ in the dominant term and achieves an improved (optimal) regret guarantees in the setting where the number of arms $K$ is significantly larger than the number of players $N$. In addition, we consider adversarial markets where the observed rewards of the agents may be corrupted. We propose and analyze algorithms for robust markets with CPT as risk sensitive measure in both settings where the total corruption budget is known and where it is unknown, and establish logarithmic player-optimal regret guarantees in both cases.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines

arXiv:2606.19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs). PQLRM combines Pareto Q-Learning (PQL), which maintains sets of vector-valued Q-estimates to approximate the Pareto front, with enhancements from Q-Learning with Reward Machines (QRM), which exploits the factored automaton structure of the reward signal. This yields a multi-policy algorithm that remains sample-efficient under non-Markovian, RM-encoded rewards. Experimental trials show that PQLRM converges faster than a naive PQL baseline applied to the cross-product MDP and can synthesize Pareto-optimal policies that QRM cannot.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Unifying spacetime approaches to quantum mechanics

arXiv:2606.12539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent efforts to formulate quantum mechanics in a way that treats space and time on a more equal footing have led to a large variety of spacetime-oriented approaches. In this work we present a detailed study of spacetime states, the objects that play the role of quantum states in the recently introduced framework of spacetime quantum mechanics, and show that the main proposals in the literature are different manifestations of the same underlying object. Path integrals, quantum states over time, pseudo-density matrices, the Page and Wootters mechanism, superdensity operators, and timelike-entanglement proposals all arise from spacetime states through particular evaluations, reduced information, linear maps, or quantum channels. This unification provides explicit mathematical representations of these formalisms, reveals relations among them, and clarifies the spacetime information each one captures. We also study the broader relevance of the spacetime-state point of view for Leggett-Garg inequalities, OTOCs, temporal tensor networks, fermionic systems, relativistic QFTs, quantum reference frames, and classical physics, together with additional insights and perspectives revealed by the common unifying framework.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

Authors:

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.