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

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot MRI Reconstruction with Non-local Image Priors

Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Learning (ZS-SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction, eliminating the reliance on fully-sampled external datasets. However, learning solely from a single under-sampled scan suffers from supervision scarcity and optimization instability, often leading to overfitting or artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a robust physics-driven ZS-SSL framework that synergizes physical consistency with image-domain non-local priors. Our method introduces three core innovations: (1) a Coil Sensitivity Map (CSM)-Guided Dynamic Repository, which stabilizes the training trajectory by filtering physically inconsistent artifacts based on coil sensitivity constraints; (2) a SPIRiT-based regularization, which enforces k-space self-consistency via a learned correlation kernel and stochastic masking; (3) a Non-Local Self-Similarity (NSS) Pixel Bank, which leverages the high-fidelity reference established by the former modules to explicitly mine non-local anatomical similarities, thereby augmenting supervision in the image domain. Extensive experiments on the FastMRI dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under high acceleration factors, effectively bridging the gap between zero-shot learning and supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Zolento/NS-SSL.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MLUBench: A Benchmark for Lifelong Unlearning Evaluation in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.12809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are trained on massive multimodal data, making data unlearning increasingly important as data owners may request the removal of specific content. In practice, these requests often arrive sequentially over time, giving rise to the challenging problem of MLLM Lifelong Unlearning. However, most existing benchmarks are limited in scale and scope, failing to capture the complexities of MLLM lifelong unlearning. To fill this gap, we introduce the MLUBench, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark featuring 127 entities across 9 classes under lifelong unlearning requests. We perform extensive experiments using MLUBench and reveal that existing unlearning methods suffer from severe, cumulative degradation. More critically, we further identify the unique challenge of this problem: unlike in unimodal models, MLLM lifelong unlearning is constrained by the need to preserve multimodal alignment. Continually unlearning from one modality could degrade the entire model. To alleviate this challenge, we propose LUMoE, an effective method. Experiments demonstrate that LUMoE significantly mitigates the degradation problem faced by baselines. The source code and the MLUBench dataset are open-sourced in https://github.com/lihe-maxsize/Lifelong_Unlearning_main.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dynamically frozen long-distance entanglement via non-Hermitian PT-symmetric systems

arXiv:2606.14177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In distributed quantum networks, interacting spin systems can mediate the generation of highly entangled links between distant nodes. We investigate the role of effective parity-time (PT)-symmetric non-Hermitian spin-1/2 bulks weakly coupled to two quantum links, obtained due to the environmental interactions affecting both the bulk and the links. Focusing on effective non-Hermitian nearest-neighbor (NN) Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models, we analyze how non-Hermiticity influences the dynamical formation of long-distance entanglement (LDE). For a paradigmatic model consisting of a quantum XX bulk subjected to imaginary staggered magnetic fields, we analytically determine the exceptional points arising from the resulting bulk-mediated interactions between the links. Combining analytical and numerical methods, we demonstrate that an initially fully separable state can dynamically evolve into highly entangled link states near these exceptional points in the broken regime. Further, after optimizing over time and system parameters, near-unit time-averaged entanglement between the links emerges under weak imaginary magnetic fields and bulk-link couplings, which cannot be attained in the corresponding Hermitian systems. Moreover, the non-Hermitian dynamics exhibit a freezing of high entanglement in the vicinity of exceptional points, a feature absent in Hermitian counterparts. We also identify regimes of long-range interaction strengths that yield a higher time-averaged entanglement than the corresponding NN models. Furthermore, we establish that LDE persists in the stationary regime, highlighting the promise of engineered non-Hermitian dynamics for realizing robust and frozen entangled links in quantum networks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Asymptotics of the number of labelled connected sparse multitype graphs

arXiv:2606.17912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the asymptotic enumeration of labelled connected multitype graphs in the sparse regime, where both the number of vertices and edges grow linearly and the excess is proportional to the size of the graph. Extending the classical theory of connected graph enumeration to the multitype setting, we consider graphs with prescribed numbers of vertices of each type and prescribed edge counts between each pair of types. Our approach is probabilistic and relies on the theory of inhomogeneous random graphs. In particular, we exploit large-deviation principles and asymptotic estimates for connectedness probabilities to relate the counting problem to the emergence of giant components in suitably tuned supercritical random graphs. From large deviation asymptotics of connected components of inhomogeneous random graphs, we recognize that a connected graph with a given edge statistics corresponds to the (unique) giant component of larger inhomogeneous random graph with a suitably chosen connection kernel. This correspondence allows us to derive the leading exponential asymptotics for the number of connected multitype graphs with fixed type profile and edge matrix. The resulting formula generalizes the asymptotic enumeration results of Bender, Canfield, and McKay for connected sparse graphs to the multitype framework. More broadly, the paper illustrates how probabilistic techniques can provide transparent and effective tools for addressing new combinatorial enumeration problems.

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

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

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

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation. We present proof-of-concept implementations of the CoD framework, including a GRPO-style RL algorithm with fine-grained credit assignment, as well as tasks and environments tailored to the targeted meta-capability (rather than domain-specific LLM capabilities or standard task-by-task RL). Empirical results validate the efficacy of end-to-end RL training in the CoD setting, and demonstrate the potential for out-of-distribution generalization – within the training domains, across different domains, and from CoD to Ralph-loop settings – of the elicited meta-capability. Our investigation of CoD connects several lines of prior works, and opens up new opportunities for advancing LLMs and AI agents. To facilitate further research and applications, we release our implementations at \url{https://github.com/agentscope-ai/Trinity-RFT/tree/research/cod/examples/research_cod}.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Can Editing 1 Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

arXiv:2606.13705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Yes. Can it cure doom loops? Probably not. The Gemma 4 instruction-tuned models share a reproducible failure: on long factual enumeration prompts, such as listing every episode of a TV series, the 88 IAU constellations, or the 151 original Pokemon, they collapse into repetition, either a tight verbatim loop or a list whose entries decay onto a single answer. These loops occur at rates as high as 95% and survive prompt rewording, inference-engine changes, and most sampling adjustments. In this paper we explore whether this behavior is localized enough to remove by weight edits. To localize the cause, we use per-layer ablation and per-neuron attribution, then confirm the strongest candidates with full-generation sweeps. The loops trace to a small set of MLP neurons (or, in the 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts model, a few routed experts) which we suppress with static weight edits. These "surgeries" can be as small as a single sign-inverted neuron (in the E2B model). The size of the effective edits grows with model scale, but in all cases, the loop patterns can be addressed at normal generation budgets while preserving general-purpose benchmark scores. However, the edits do not solve everything: we also study longer thinking budgets, where the two larger models most visibly enter doom looping, i.e. a non-convergent regime in which the model self-corrects in circles over a fact it cannot recall, exhausting the budget without committing to a final answer. We show this residual failure is reduced but not eliminated by the same edits, and argue it is fundamentally a knowledge-precision problem rather than a removable circuit; weight surgery can delete a loop, but it cannot supply a missing fact. Our results are both a feasibility demonstration, that is, evidence that a concrete generation pathology can be localized to a few parameters and edited out, and a delineation of where that approach stops.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in Long-Form Video

Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video temporal grounding, yet real-world applications routinely require localizing every event that satisfies compositional temporal and spatial conditions. Existing benchmarks fall short: they localize only a single moment per query, count without temporal conditions, or treat grounding and counting as disjoint tasks. We introduce CoMET-Bench for Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in long-form video, comprising 2789 queries over 600 videos averaging 33.8 minutes across five real-world domains, with each query composed from 4 temporal conditions, 3 spatial conditions, and a dedicated negative-query subset. We further propose a unified evaluation protocol jointly measuring counting, grounding, and negative-query recognition, including a new Rejection-F1 metric that prevents trivial gaming by lazy "always-empty" models. Benchmarking a broad suite of MLLMs, agent-based, and grounding-specialized methods reveals that existing approaches remain far from solving this task. Building on these findings, we propose CoMET-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that reformulates the task as structured search-and-aggregate, improving F1@0.5 by 6.1% over GPT-5 purely through structural reasoning. Failure analysis further surfaces three open directions: fine-grained entity tracking, position-uniform retrieval, and causal event pairing.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

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

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Cluster sizes in subcritical soft Boolean models

arXiv:2404.13730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the soft Boolean model, a model that interpolates between the Boolean model and long-range percolation, where vertices are given via a stationary Poisson point process. Each vertex carries an independent Pareto-distributed radius and each pair of vertices is assigned another independent Pareto weight with a potentially different tail exponent. Two vertices are now connected if they are within distance of the larger radius multiplied by the edge weight. We determine the tail behaviour of the Euclidean diameter and the number of points of a typical maximally connected component in a subcritical percolation phase. For this, we present a sharp criterion in terms of the tail exponents of the edge-weight and radius distributions that distinguish a regime where the tail behaviour is controlled only by the edge exponent from a regime in which both exponents are relevant. Our proofs rely on fine path-counting arguments identifying the precise order of decay of the probability that far-away vertices are connected.

14.
Science (Express) 2026-06-04

Long-range extended chains arising from polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A central challenge for conjugated polymers is to achieve long-range order while remaining solution-processable, which is essential for matching the electrical performance of their counterparts of crystalline inorganic semiconductors. Here we show that n-doped poly(benzodifurandione) (n-PBDF) can undergo polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly (PSA), in which chain growth, chemical doping, and structural ordering are intrinsically coupled, yielding long-range chain extension over hundreds of nanometers. We reveal that the spontaneously formed n-PBDF nanoribbons arise from a self-initiated, convergent growth mechanism driven by cooperative monomer–polymer interactions and stabilized by proton-coupled duplex chains and the polymer’s intrinsic polyelectrolyte character. With long-range extended chains in the nanoribbons, the aligned n-PBDF thin films demonstrate metallic-level conductivity (>10 4 Siemens per centimeter).

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

Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence. We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code and models will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tamed Feynman-Kac diffusion processes: Killing-branching intertwine

arXiv:2605.07824v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relaxation to equilibrium of a drifted Brownian motion is quantified by a transition probability density function, whose main (multiplicative) entry is an inferred Feynman-Kac kernel of the Schr\"{o}dinger semigroup operator. Although seemingly devoid of a natural probabilistic significance (except for its explicit path integral definition), the pertinent kernel relaxes to equilibrium as well. The implicit Feynman-Kac potential ${\cal{V}}(x)$, continuous, confining and bounded from below, may take negative values. If positive, ${\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the killing rate of the decaying diffusion process. In case of relaxing F-K kernels the killing effects are tamed (often overcompensated). The taming inavoidably appears in conjunction with the existence of the negativity subdomains of ${\cal{V}}(x)$ in $R$. If locally ${\cal{V}}(x) < 0$, its sign inversion $- {\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the branching (cloning, alternatively bifurcation) rate in the course of the other wise free random motion. The arising killed diffusion processes with branching, we interpret as the possible path-wise background of tamed (relaxing) Feynman-Kac diffusions. We present acomputer-assisted path-wise arguments, towards a consistency of the killing/branching taming scenario, for a number of nonlinear model systems in one space dimension. Special attention is paid to Feynman-Kac potential shapes in the double well form, where an analytic access to eigenvalues and eigenfunctions is scarce. Throughout the paper the dynamics refers to the positive real time. Since the Newton-type equations of motion for admissible classical trajectories have a Euclidean form (due to the sign inverted force term), we give a brief resume of a couple of their explicit solutions, without recourse to the Euclidean time intuitions, and the instanton lore of related quantum model systems.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Kernel of Partition Paths: A Unified Representation for Tree Ensembles

arXiv:2606.18853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of work has reframed individual decision trees as linear models on engineered features associated with their splits, opening routes for oracle inequalities and feature-importance reinterpretation, but leaving open the question of what unified geometric object a forest induces when one indexes its feature map by nodes rather than by splits. The present paper studies that object. KPP indexes the feature map by the nodes of the forest, weighted by a path metric that turns each coordinate into a component of a squared-Euclidean path-isometric embedding. KPP unifies four pillars under a single non-diagonal Gram that carries a metric: prediction, exact additive attribution, deterministic Lipschitz robust radius in the KPP metric, and uniform Rademacher risk bounds for regression and classification under fixed, honest, or cross-fit conditioning. All probabilistic guarantees are conditional on the representation and are stated under three explicit conditioning regimes; the robust-radius guarantee is deterministic in the KPP metric rather than in a norm on the raw input. Conjectured fast-rate refinements for both regression and classification are stated as open problems and are not claimed as theorems.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agentic MPC for Semantic Control System Resynthesis

While MPC effectively handles structured, diverse, and low-level specifications, it lacks the capability to dynamically incorporate high-level contextual information such as social norms, user intent, or natural language instructions. To address this limitation, this manuscript introduces an agentic MPC framework that enables context-aware, semantically adaptive control synthesis by integrating with large language model-based agents. The agent interprets heterogeneous inputs, including natural language messages, environmental observations, and external knowledge, to resynthesize the control specifications. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated in an autonomous driving scenario, where the system aligns with personal preferences or responds to social situations such as emergency vehicle yielding.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

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

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.