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

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

Authors:

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2605.29526v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ever-evolving transaction patterns have significantly hindered anomaly detection on emerging cryptocurrency blockchains due to the vast number of addresses and diverse anomalous behaviors. Recently, advanced Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) approaches applied to blockchains have faced two critical challenges: adversarial pattern evolution by malicious actors and the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem caused by varied transaction semantics on blockchains. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed TEmporal Motif-aware Graph Test-Time Adaptation (TEMG-TTA). First, we comprehensively capture the 3-node temporal motif distribution of each active address using an efficient computational mechanism, enabling downstream temporal motif-aware graph learning. Second, we design a simple yet effective test-time adaptation strategy to facilitate the sharing of common patterns between training and testing graphs. Extensive experiments on 5 real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed TEMG-TTA outperforms state-of-the-art GAD approaches by an average of 54.88\%. A further case study on interpretable motif patterns reveals that TEMG-TTA explicitly characterizes the complex transaction patterns of anomalous addresses, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our technical designs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LuoXishuang0712/TEMG-TTA/.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

MA-ProofBench: A Two-Tiered Evaluation of LLMs for Theorem Proving in Mathematical Analysis

arXiv:2606.13782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in automated theorem proving, yet existing formal benchmarks remain limited in both mathematical coverage and difficulty. Most are concentrated in areas that are easier to formalize, such as algebra and elementary number theory, and provide limited coverage of subfields that require deeper reasoning, including mathematical analysis. To address this gap, we introduce MA-ProofBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first formal theorem-proving benchmark dedicated to Mathematical Analysis. The benchmark contains 200 formalized theorems covering 6 core topics and 27 subcategories, including measure and integration theory, complex analysis, and functional analysis. The problems are divided into two difficulty levels, an undergraduate level (Level I, 100 problems) and a Ph.D. qualifying level (Level II, 100 problems), to evaluate how well LLMs perform formal reasoning at different mathematical depths. Each problem is constructed through a human-led, LLM-assisted formalization pipeline followed by independent expert review, ensuring that the formal statements remain faithful to the original mathematics. We evaluate a range of recent general-purpose reasoning models and formal theorem provers on MA-ProofBench. However, most models perform poorly: even the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 16% Pass@8 on Level I and 5% on Level II, while most models stay close to 0% on Level II. Further analysis identifies Mathlib hallucinations and incomplete proofs as the two dominant failure modes, while an evaluation on the natural-language version of the benchmark exposes a clear gap between informal and formal reasoning. MA-ProofBench is intended to serve as a reliable reference for tracking progress in formal mathematical reasoning in advanced domains.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

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

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

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

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.

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

SAMA: Semantic Anchor-aligned Augmentation for Unified Low-Resource Multimodal Information Extraction

Multimodal Information Extraction (MIE)-covering tasks such as Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER), Relation Extraction (MRE), and Event Extraction (MEE)-is essential for understanding multimedia content but remains constrained by severe data scarcity. Although data augmentation is a promising remedy, existing approaches are impeded by coarse cross-modal alignment and fragmented, task-specific designs that fail to exploit shared semantic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Semantic Anchor-aligned Multimodal Augmentation (SAMA), a unified framework for generating high-fidelity, task-aware synthetic data. SAMA constructs structured semantic anchors from ground-truth labels to guide a Collaborative Multi-Experts Multimodal Large Language Model (CME-MLLM), which integrates a Universal Adapter for shared semantics with Task-Specific Adapters to produce diverse yet constraint-compliant textual samples. For image synthesis, SAMA employs an Anchor-Preserving Diffusion mechanism that uses anchor-weighted prompts and latent conditioning to maintain critical semantic anchors while diversifying visual contexts. To eliminate the need for manual verification, SAMA further introduces a Dual-Constraint Filtering module that selects synthetic samples based on both cross-modal consistency and anchor fidelity. Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets for MNER, MRE, and MEE demonstrate that SAMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under both fully supervised and low-resource settings, underscoring its versatility, robustness, and effectiveness.

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

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

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

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

ChiKhaPo: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Lexical Comprehension and Generation in Large Language Models

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact that LLMs lack basic linguistic competence in the vast majority of the world's 3800+ written languages. We introduce ChiKhaPo, consisting of 8 subtasks of varying difficulty designed to evaluate the lexical comprehension and generation abilities of generative models. ChiKhaPo draws on existing lexicons, monolingual data, and bitext, and provides coverage for 2700+ languages for 2 subtasks, surpassing any existing benchmark in terms of language coverage. We further show that 6 SOTA models struggle on our benchmark, and discuss the factors contributing to performance scores, including language family, language resourcedness, task, and comprehension versus generation directions. With ChiKhaPo, we hope to enable and encourage the massively multilingual benchmarking of LLMs.

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

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601.22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Cross-Silo De-Anonymization Under Local Differential Privacy: Threat Model, Phase Transition, and Coordination Necessity

arXiv:2606.16763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a person's records appear in k independent data silos, each protected by (epsilon, delta)-differential privacy, standard composition yields a valid (k*epsilon, k*delta)-DP guarantee for the joint output. This worst-case bound, however, does not answer the concrete inference question: at what k can an adversary actually identify a target person? This paper develops the information-theoretic framework needed to answer that question. We introduce cross-silo person-level DP (XSP-DP), a Pufferfish-style privacy notion whose adjacency relation captures all records of a single person across all silos simultaneously, and verify that the standard basic composition bound carries over to this adjacency model. Within this framework we prove that de-anonymization undergoes a phase transition at k* = Theta(log n / epsilon^2) (population size n, per-silo RR parameter epsilon): a Fano lower bound shows any estimator fails for k > k*. An explicit XOR + randomized-response construction demonstrates information synergy: each silo's output is individually uninformative about the target, yet the joint mutual information is strictly positive. For non-coordinated binary randomized-response mechanisms, we prove that de-anonymization is inevitable once k exceeds the threshold, establishing that cross-silo coordination is necessary. These results provide a baseline threat model and Theta-level threshold for cross-silo inference attacks under local DP.

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

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

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

Stable and Steerable Sparse Autoencoders with Weight Regularization

arXiv:2603.04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied weight regularization by adding L1 or L2 penalties on encoder and decoder weights, and evaluate how regularization interacts with common SAE training defaults. On MNIST, we observe that L2 weight regularization produces a core of highly aligned features and, when combined with tied initialization and unit-norm decoder constraints, it dramatically increases cross-seed feature consistency. For TopK SAEs trained on language model activations (Pythia-70M-deduped), adding a small L2 weight penalty increased the fraction of features shared across three random seeds and roughly doubles steering success rates, while leaving the mean of automated interpretability scores essentially unchanged. Finally, in the regularized setting, activation steering success becomes better predicted by auto-interpretability scores, suggesting that regularization can align text-based feature explanations with functional controllability.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MemSlides: A Hierarchical Memory Driven Agent Framework for Personalized Slide Generation with Multi-turn Local Revision

Personalized presentation generation requires more than conditioning on a current prompt or template: agents must preserve stable user preferences across tasks, retain newly introduced preferences and constraints during multi-turn revision, and carry out local edits reliably. We propose MemSlides, a hierarchical memory framework for personalized presentation agents that separates long-term memory from working memory and further divides long-term memory into user profile memory and tool memory. User profile memory stores intent-conditioned profiles for round-0 personalization, working memory carries active preferences and session constraints across revision rounds, and tool memory stores reusable execution experience for reliable localized editing. MemSlides pairs this memory design with scoped slide-local revision, so targeted updates act on the smallest affected region instead of repeatedly regenerating the full deck. In controlled experiments, user profile memory improves persona-alignment judgments on a multi-persona, multi-intent profile bank, tool-memory injection improves closed-loop modify behavior in diagnostic matched-pair settings, and qualitative cases illustrate working memory's ability to carryover preferences. Taken together, these results suggest that effective personalization in presentation authoring depends on separating persistent user profiles, session-level working memory, and reusable execution experience across generation and localized revision.

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

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hyperinvariant Spin Network States – An AdS/CFT Model from First Principles

arXiv:2510.06602v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the existence and limitations of hyperinvariant tensor networks incorporating a local SU(2) symmetry. As discrete implementations of the anti de-Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, such networks have created bridges between the fields of quantum information theory and quantum gravity. Adding SU(2) symmetry to the tensor network allows a direct connection to spin network states, a basis of the kinematic Hilbert space of loop quantum gravity (LQG). We consider a particular situation where the states can be interpreted as kinematic quantum states for three-dimensional quantum gravity. We show that important aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence are realized in certain quantum states of the gravitational field in LQG, thus justifying, from first principles, a class of models introduced by [F. Pastawski et al., JHEP 06, 149 (2015)]. We provide examples of hyperinvariant tensor networks, but also prove constraints on their existence in the form of no-go theorems that exclude absolutely maximally entangled states as well as general holographic codes from local SU(2)-invariance. We calculate surface areas as expectation values of the LQG area operator and discuss further possible constraints as a consequence of a decay of correlations on the boundary.

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

It Takes One to Bias Them All: Breaking Bad with One-Shot GRPO

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements. Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned through large-scale post-training to ensure fair and reliable behavior. In this work, we investigate how easily such guardrails can be broken by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We show that one-shot GRPO training on a single biased example is sufficient to induce systematic bias, with stereotype-driven reasoning generalizing across attributes, categories, and benchmarks. We further find that models differ in their susceptibility based on the initial likelihood of producing biased outputs. Our results reveal a critical vulnerability in post-training: alignment can be overridden by a single example.

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

Bayesian Tensor Decomposition with Diffusion Model Prior

arXiv:2606.03212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Low-rank tensor decomposition (TD) is usually effective on clean, fully observed data, but it often degrades under severe missingness or noise. Low-rankness is itself a useful but limited structural prior, and additional handcrafted priors (e.g., sparsity or smoothness) still fall short of capturing the rich statistics of real-world data. To compensate for this weak inductive bias under heavy corruption, one would like to inject a learned, data-driven prior; however, the state-of-the-art diffusion models are not readily compatible with current TD and tractable posterior inference. To address these challenges, we introduce DiffBCP, a hybrid-prior Bayesian CP decomposition framework that couples a cumulative shrinkage process prior over the CP factors for automatic rank selection with an off-the-shelf pre-trained diffusion model as an implicit data prior on the reconstructed tensor. To make posterior inference tractable despite the coupling among the likelihood, low-rank constraint, and diffusion prior, we develop a split Gibbs sampler: CP factors admit conjugate updates, while the diffusion block is sampled via low-rank-guided denoising. A noise-adaptive coupling schedule further reduces sensitivity to hand-tuned annealing. Experiments on image inpainting and denoising, including high-resolution out-of-distribution images, show consistent gains over Bayesian, nonlinear, and plug-and-play TD baselines.

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

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

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

Semi-Supervised Speech Confidence Detection using Pseudo-Labelling and Whisper Embeddings

arXiv:2606.16505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding speaker confidence is crucial in educational settings, as it can enhance personalised feedback and improve learning outcomes. This study introduces a novel framework for detecting speaker confidence by integrating human-engineered features with embeddings from the Whisper encoder. To address data limitations, a pseudo-labelling technique is employed to expand the labelled dataset, allowing the model to learn from both human-annotated and model-generated labels. The framework combines traditional speech features including pitch, volume, rate of speech, and the presence of disfluencies and stress, with Whisper embeddings, and uses a co-attention mechanism to fuse these representations and achieve an overall accuracy of 75%. This study contributes to advancing speech analysis, enabling applications that support personalised learning and speaking skill development.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

DuET: Dual Expert Trajectories for Diffusion Image Editing

Recent diffusion editors perform diverse instruction-based edits while conditioning on the source image at every denoising step. Yet persistent source-image conditioning can limit how fully an edit is executed and how natural the result appears, especially when the target scene diverges substantially from the input. We introduce DuET (Dual Expert Trajectories), a training-free inference method that temporarily relaxes source-image conditioning by transitioning through a text-to-image phase before returning to edit mode, allowing the denoising trajectory to move toward the target distribution while retaining the structural benefits of image-conditioned editing. Without modifying model weights or increasing sampling cost, DuET consistently improves instruction relevance, semantic fidelity, and perceptual quality across diverse models and benchmarks. In some cases, these gains come with a modest reduction in source-image preservation, revealing a predictable trade-off between source preservation and edit fidelity.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Forbidden transitions in superconducting artificial atoms

arXiv:2606.06069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial atoms built from Josephson junctions have become a powerful tool to explore the limits of quantum optics due to their strong coupling to electromagnetic fields and their sensitivity to changes at the single-photon level. This sensitivity to quantum fluctuations complements their metrological and computational use, which are based on the precise oscillating frequency of the underlying supercurrents. We present here a theory for Josephson junctions immersed in electromagnetic fields where focus is shifted from temporal correlations and towards spatial ones. Unlike the commonly used circuit and black-box descriptions, our work is based on a microscopic model that enables systematically accounting for the effect of the spatial and vectorial profile of an electromagnetic field over a junction. As an example of the interactions that emerge in such a setup, we investigate the possibility of driving a junction via a quadrupole transition, using typical experimental parameters in existing devices. With the transition being dependent on the gradient of the electric field – rather than its intensity – the junction can be excited in a region where the electric field vanishes.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ARTEMIS: Agent-guided Reliability-aware Temporal Mask Evolution for Imperfectly Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Imperfectly supervised video polyp segmentation (VPS) aims to learn dense, temporally consistent masks from inexpensive supervision, including weak annotations (points, scribbles) and semi-supervision with few densely labeled frames. This setting is clinically valuable but challenging due to weak contrast, ambiguous boundaries, motion blur, and specular highlights, compounded by sparse pixel-level guidance. While SAM2 can generate dense masks from sparse inputs, direct pseudo-labeling often yields geometry-degraded masks with boundary leakage, underutilizes temporal consistency, and ignores reliability. To address these issues, we propose ARTEMIS, a unified framework for imperfectly supervised VPS driven by agent-guided reliability-aware temporal mask evolution. ARTEMIS initializes coarse masks from available supervision: SAM2 converts points/scribbles, while dense labels serve as reliable anchors. A debate-and-judge vision-language agent selects reliable temporal anchors under weak supervision, which are propagated bidirectionally with SAM2 to refine unreliable or unlabeled frames. Finally, ARTEMIS trains the segmenter using temporal reliability-aware robust learning, incorporating reliability-guided reference selection, a Reference Prototype Transport Module, and reliability-aware robust loss. These components assess mask reliability, evolve anchors over time, transport target identity across frames, and down-weight noisy supervision instead of discarding difficult samples. Experiments on SUN-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB-612 under scribble, point, and limited-label settings demonstrate that ARTEMIS achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/wangtong627/ARTEMIS.