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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can professional translators identify machine-generated text?

Authors:
Michael Farrell↗

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

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03.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

<b>PROTEUS trial heralds perioperative therapy for prostate cancer</b>

Authors:
Karen O’Leary↗

Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer. Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Pump-Free Patient-Derived Human Proximal Tubule Microphysiological System for Modeling Flow-Dependent Epithelial Maturation and Cisplatin Injury

Authors:
Sekiguchi↗Suzuki↗Nakao↗Hori↗Mori↗Mirza↗A. F↗Shindoh↗Morita↗Mandai↗Fujiki↗Kikuchi↗…

Recent initiatives by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health to reduce animal testing in drug development have highlighted the need for in vitro platforms that better recapitulate human biology for preclinical safety assessment. Drug-induced nephrotoxicity remains a major cause of drug attrition, underscoring the need for human-relevant kidney models. To address this, a pump-free human patient-derived proximal tubule microphysiological system was developed by integrating human renal proximal tubular epithelial cells (hRPTECs), isolated from non-tumorous nephrectomy cortex, with a porous membrane-based microfluidic device. Expanded hRPTECs were cultured for 10 days under static conditions or rocker-driven shear stress approximating physiological proximal tubular flow. Shear stress increased epithelial density, enhanced proximal tubule marker expression (Na+/K+-ATPase and aquaporin-1), and improved Zonula occludens-1 and occludin localization. Bulk RNA sequencing demonstrated transcriptomic changes associated with enhanced apical maturation and epithelial signature. In cisplatin-induced injury assays, shear-conditioned epithelia exhibited reduced cell density and increased {gamma}H2AX staining, indicating greater sensitivity to nephrotoxicity. These findings demonstrate that rocker-driven shear stress promotes epithelial maturation in patient-derived hRPTECs. The pump-free human patient-derived proximal tubule microphysiological system offers a practical, scalable, and physiologically relevant platform for modeling flow-dependent proximal tubule biology and assessing human-relevant nephrotoxicity.

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

CRUMB: Efficient Prior Fitted Network Inference via Distributionally Matched Context Batching

Authors:
Jamie Heredge↗Mattia J. Villani↗Pranav Deshpande↗Akshay Seshadri↗Niraj Kumar↗

arXiv:2606.11473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior-fitted networks (PFNs) are a promising class of tabular foundation models that perform in-context learning, whereby the entire labelled training set is supplied as context, and predictions for test queries are produced in a single forward pass. However, the quadratically scaling self-attention mechanism in many PFN architectures makes inference prohibitive for very large training datasets. We propose CRUMB (Clustered Retrieval Using Minimised-MMD Batching), a three-stage inference wrapper that (i) clusters the test queries, (ii) selects a small, distributionally matched training subset for each cluster by greedily minimising the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), and (iii) runs exact PFN inference on each reduced-context batch. CRUMB is architecture-agnostic and requires no retraining. On the 51-dataset TabArena benchmark, evaluated across three PFN architectures (TabPFNv2, TabICLv1, TabICLv2), we show that CRUMB outperforms similar state-of-the-art context selection strategies. We also show that CRUMB is resilient to covariate drift, as the MMD-minimisation step naturally helps align the training context distribution to match the current test batch distributions.

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

Generalized Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss

Authors:
Jiequan Cui↗Beier Zhu↗Qingshan Xu↗Zhuotao Tian↗Xiaojuan Qi↗Bei Yu↗Hanwang Zhang↗Richang Hong↗

In this paper, we delve deeper into the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence loss and mathematically prove that it is equivalent to the Decoupled Kullback-Leibler (DKL) Divergence loss that consists of (1) a weighted Mean Square Error (wMSE) loss and (2) a Cross-Entropy loss incorporating soft labels. Thanks to the decoupled structure of DKL loss, we have identified two areas for improvement. Firstly, we address the limitation of KL loss in scenarios like knowledge distillation by breaking its asymmetric optimization property along with a smoother weight function. This modification effectively alleviates convergence challenges in optimization, particularly for classes with high predicted scores in soft labels. Secondly, we introduce class-wise global information into KL/DKL to reduce bias arising from individual samples. With these two enhancements, we derive the Generalized Kullback-Leibler (GKL) Divergence loss and evaluate its effectiveness by conducting experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and vision-language datasets, focusing on adversarial training, and knowledge distillation tasks. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art adversarial robustness on the public leaderboard – RobustBench and competitive knowledge distillation performance across CIFAR/ImageNet models and CLIP models, demonstrating the substantial practical merits. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiequancui/DKL.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Conservation Laws for Modern Neural Architectures

Authors:
Viet-Hoang Tran↗Vinh Khanh Bui↗Tan Lai Ngoc↗Nam Nguyen↗Tuan Dam↗Tan M. Nguyen↗

arXiv:2606.17816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding gradient descent dynamics is key to explaining the success of over-parameterized models, where implicit bias manifests through conservation laws in gradient flow. While such laws are well understood for linear and ReLU networks, they remain largely unexplored for modern architectures. This work develops a unified framework to characterize conservation laws for contemporary models, including feedforward networks with GELU, SiLU, and SwiGLU activations, multihead attention with sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings, and Mixture-of-Experts architectures under diverse gating designs. Our theoretical findings are supported by experiments that validate the predicted invariants.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Authors:
Viktor Kewenig↗Andrew Lampinen↗Samuel A. Nastase↗Christopher Edwards↗Quitterie Lacome D'Elascombe↗Akilles Rechardt↗Jeremy I Skipper↗Gabriella Vigliocco↗

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

AsyncOPD: How Stale Can On-Policy Distillation Be?

Authors:
Wonjun Kang↗Kevin Galim↗Seunghyuk Oh↗Minjun Kang↗Sanghyun Park↗Donghoon Kim↗Minjae Lee↗Minseo Kim↗Rishabh Tiwari↗Yuchen Zeng↗Hyung Il Koo↗Kangwook Lee↗…

arXiv:2606.24143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own rollouts guided by teacher feedback and is becoming increasingly important for large language model (LLM) post-training. Like reinforcement learning (RL), however, OPD faces an on-policy systems bottleneck, as rollouts can dominate training time for reasoning workloads. Asynchronous training pipelines can alleviate this bottleneck by decoupling rollout generation from learner updates, but doing so introduces stale-policy data. While prior work has studied stale data in asynchronous RL, its effects in OPD remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of staleness in asynchronous OPD, focusing on a practical setting where teacher feedback is implemented through local KL losses and full-vocabulary teacher logits are too expensive to store or transfer, necessitating finite teacher-score caches. We first show that KL direction changes the stale-data problem: teacher-weighted forward KL is more robust to stale rollouts, whereas student-weighted reverse KL is vulnerable. Second, for this vulnerable reverse-KL case, we study whether methods designed to stabilize asynchronous RL can mitigate OPD staleness. In our experiments, they do not improve over a simpler OPD-specific surrogate: recomputing the reverse-KL signal under the current student at learner time. Third, we analyze how finite teacher-score caches create a bias-variance tradeoff for sparse and sampled reverse-KL OPD estimators. This motivates multi-sample Monte Carlo (MC), which preserves MC correctability while reducing one-sample variance. Finally, we present and open-source AsyncOPD, a fully asynchronous OPD training pipeline built from these estimator choices. Experiments show that AsyncOPD improves training throughput by $1.6\times$ to $3.8\times$ over strict synchronous training while reaching comparable accuracy.

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

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

Authors:
Shirantha Welikala↗Zihao Song↗Hai Lin↗Panos J. Antsaklis↗

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

Authors:
Eranga Bandara↗Ross Gore↗Ravi Mukkamala↗Asanga Gunaratna↗Safdar H. Bouk↗Xueping Liang↗Peter Foytik↗Abdul Rahman↗Sachini Rajapakse↗Isurunima Kularathna↗Pramoda Karunarathna↗Chalani Rajapakse↗…

arXiv:2606.19116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

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

SymQNet: Amortized Acquisition for Low-Latency Adaptive Hamiltonian Learning

Authors:
Yash Vardhan Tomar↗Dheeraj Peddireddy↗Vaneet Aggarwal↗

arXiv:2606.12808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive Hamiltonian learning is central to calibrating and characterizing quantum devices. In an adaptive controller, choosing the next experiment is itself a computation. Bayesian design rules are recomputed after every posterior update, and that step can take seconds. Across hundreds of shots, those seconds become a significant wall-clock cost for adaptivity. We introduce SymQNet, an amortized reinforcement-learning approach for low-latency adaptive Hamiltonian learning. SymQNet learns a posterior-conditioned acquisition policy offline, then uses a fast policy forward pass online while retaining Bayesian posterior feedback. On transverse-field Ising benchmarks, SymQNet substantially reduces acquisition latency relative to bounded Fisher-information search and bounded two-step Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD). At five qubits, it reduces acquisition-only decision latency by $47.1\times$ and $72.6\times$ relative to these online baselines; at twelve qubits, full simulated steps take $1.02$ s for SymQNet versus $13.27$ s for bounded two-step BALD. Overall, we show that learned acquisition can make adaptive Hamiltonian learning practical for repeated low-latency workloads.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Parameter-Efficient Adapter Tuning for Tabular-Image Multimodal Learning

Authors:
Jiaqi Luo↗

Tabular-image multimodal learning aims to improve predictive modeling by jointly using structured tabular attributes and visual data. Although pretrained encoders provide strong modality-specific representations, full fine-tuning can be computationally expensive, while keeping encoders frozen may limit task-specific adaptation. We propose the Tabular-Image Adapter (TI-Adapter), a modality-specific adapter-based fine-tuning framework for efficient multimodal adaptation. TI-Adapter freezes the pretrained tabular encoder and learns an adapter after the extracted tabular embedding, while adapting the image branch with embedding-level and bottleneck-level adapters instead of full fine-tuning. Experiments on 20 tabular-image datasets show that TI-Adapter achieves competitive or better predictive performance than full fine-tuning while using substantially fewer trainable parameters. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of adapter placement for balancing performance and practical efficiency.

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

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

Authors:
Maeva Guerrier↗Koki Kobayashi↗Simon Roy↗Jana Pavlasek↗Giovanni Beltrame↗

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Explicit Quantum Circuit Simulation of Nonlinear 1-Dimensional Fluid with Carleman-linearized Boltzmann Method

Authors:
Keita Kanno↗Kazumasa Ueno↗Hayato Higuchi↗Morimasa Okamoto↗Yuya Yoshizuru↗Ryoya Ishimaru↗Towa Takagi↗Kentaro Sakamoto↗

arXiv:2606.12770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computation of fluid dynamics has attracted growing attention as a key application of fault-tolerant quantum computers anticipated in the coming decade, with lattice Boltzmann methods emerging as a particularly promising approach. Explicit and efficient elementary-gate-level circuit simulations, however, have so far been demonstrated only in the linear case. Here we include the leading nonlinearity through second-order Carleman linearization of the one-dimensional Boltzmann equation, and demonstrate, via explicit quantum-circuit simulation, the preparation of the final-time state using a Taylor-expansion-based ODE solver based on the quantum singular value transformation. With this construction, we analyze the gate and qubit complexities, which scale logarithmically with the grid size, the nonlinearity captured by the higher-order Carleman linearization, and the practical utility of higher-order expansions in the Taylor ODE solver. The construction provides a concrete baseline for computational cost reduction and further developments such as extensions to higher dimensions, complex geometries, and the extraction of physical quantities, towards industrially useful quantum CFD.

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

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Authors:
Tan Zhu↗Tong Yao↗Kananart Kuwaranancharoen↗Amit Singh↗Yushang Lai↗Deepa Mohan↗Shankara Bhargava↗

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

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17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

Authors:
Madhulatha Mandarapu↗Sandeep Kunkunuru↗

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Energy-Modulated Time-Asymmetric Spontaneous Collapse: Forward-Backward Dynamics from Stochastic Ito Reversal and Bright Solitons

Authors:
Ikechukwu C. Okoro↗Mike O. Osiele↗Godfrey E. Akpojotor↗

arXiv:2606.06452v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a rigorous theoretical framework for symmetry breaking and quantum irreversibility arising from stochastic Ito field reversal within a cubic-quintic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (CQ-NLSE) formalism. Starting from three physically motivated considerations, forward and backward nonlinear stochastic differential equations are derived via the Ito calculus. Kinematic time-reversal is shown to be fundamentally incompatible with the Ito stochastic structure, yielding the universal asymmetry-coupling parameter of 2/3. An energy-driven collapse operator proportional to the product of noise strength, local probability density, and excitation energy squared is introduced, amplifying the collapse in high-density, high-excitation regions. Exactly bright soliton solutions are obtained for a quasi-one-dimensional BEC of attractive Li-7 atoms, with forward and backward amplitude ratio of 1.870. Heat map analysis of the parameter planes reveals that the forward collapse operator grows monotonically in time while the backward counterpart decays, achieving a ratio approximately 1030, sharply distinguishing this framework from conventional symmetric collapse models.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

Authors:
Nanshan Jia↗Ramesh Johari↗Nian Si↗Zeyu Zheng↗

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

What does measuring one qubit reveal about another? $K$-networks as a directed diagnostic for quantum circuits

Authors:
Kostas Blekos↗Paulo Vitor Itabora\'i↗

arXiv:2606.16549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-qubit circuit states are hard to inspect directly, so they are often summarized by pairwise graph weights. Common pairwise weights report symmetric correlations, while many circuit questions are directed and basis-specific: if qubit $i$ is measured in a given basis, how strongly does the outcome reshape the conditional state of qubit $j$? We define $K_{i\to j}$, a directed, basis-conditioned edge weight for this question. It is large when the two measurement outcomes occur with comparable probability and leave qubit $j$ in clearly different conditional states; it is zero when the source outcome is deterministic or the target states are indistinguishable. The scalar uses standard binary-ensemble distinguishability; the paper's contribution is to turn this conditional comparison into a directed network layer for circuit states. The resulting networks are computable from two-qubit reduced density matrices. They are diagnostic (not entanglement measures): for pure two-qubit states $K$ reduces to the tangle $C^2$ (squared concurrence)[WoottersConcurrence,CKWTangle], while separable mixed states can reach $K=1$. Examples on teleportation, Grover, QAOA, and random circuit families show the intended use: $K$-networks map feed-forward, phase, and interaction-graph structure that symmetric or computational-basis summaries can leave weak or absent.

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

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

Authors:
Siya Yang↗Nanxiang Jiang↗Zhaoxin Fan↗Yunfeng Diao↗

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

XMedFusion: A Knowledge-Guided Multimodal Perception and Reasoning Framework for Autonomous Medical Systems

Authors:
Hamza Riaz↗Arham Haroon↗Maha Baig↗Muhammad Dawood Rizwan↗Muhammad Naseer Bajwa↗Muhammad Moazam Fraz↗

Autonomous medical and robotic systems increasingly rely on intelligent perception and reasoning capabilities to interpret visual data and support clinical decision making. Radiology report generation represents a critical component of such automated diagnostic workflows, yet existing end-to-end multimodal models often suffer from weak visual grounding, resulting in unreliable interpretations and omission of subtle clinical findings. This paper presents XMedFusion, a modular AI framework designed as an intelligent perception and reasoning module for autonomous medical systems. The proposed framework decomposes visual information into coordinated functional components that emulate expert-driven analysis, including a visual perception agent that extracts image-grounded evidence, a knowledge graph construction agent that structures clinically relevant findings, and a retrieval-guided drafting process that ensures a consistent reporting structure. A synthesis agent iteratively integrates visual and structured evidence through reasoning-driven verification to produce reliable and interpretable diagnostic outputs. Experimental evaluation on a public chest radiograph dataset demonstrates significant improvements over baseline vision-language models, achieving gains from 0.0493 to 0.3359 in BLEU-1, 0.0863 to 0.2440 in ROUGE-L, and 0.0829 to 0.1708 in METEOR, along with substantial improvements in semantic evaluation metrics such as Consistency (2.38 to 7.80) and Accuracy (2.34 to 6.93). The results highlight the effectiveness of structured multi-agent perception and reasoning for enhancing robustness, transparency, and automation in intelligent medical imaging systems, enabling integration into autonomous healthcare and robotic diagnostic workflows.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

Authors:
Jiayi Wang↗Xu-Yao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Beyond Parallel Sampling: Diverse Query Initialization for Agentic Search

Authors:
Sidhaarth Murali↗Jo\~ao Coelho↗Jingjie Ning↗Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes↗Bruno Martins↗Chenyan Xiong↗

arXiv:2606.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling for agentic search typically increases depth (i.e., more turns and tokens per trajectory) or breadth (i.e., more parallel rollouts). Here we focus on breadth scaling, showing that standard parallel sampling yields diminishing returns, tracing this to query redundancy at the first turn. When models issue similar first queries across rollouts, the threads retrieve overlapping evidence, and subsequent turns are conditioned on this shared retrieval. We address this limitation with DivInit, a training-free intervention at the first turn. Rather than sampling k independent first queries, DivInit draws n candidates from a single call, picks k < n diverse seeds, and runs them as parallel trajectories. Across five open-weight models and eight benchmarks, DivInit consistently improves over standard parallel sampling, with average gains of five to seven points on multi-hop QA at matched compute. Code available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/diverse-query-initialization

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