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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

arXiv:2606.11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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

PH-KAN: Port-Hamiltonian Kolmogorov-Arnold Network

arXiv:2606.14708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-driven machine learning approaches have become increasingly attractive for nonlinear system identification, but standard models often fail to preserve the underlying physical structure and remain difficult to interpret, especially when no analytical model is available. In this context, port-Hamiltonian (pH) models provide a natural physics-informed representation. However, when these models are parameterized with standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), the learned constitutive components often remain poorly interpretable. In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving identification framework for nonlinear port-Hamiltonian systems based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). The proposed PH-KAN model parameterizes the interconnection matrix, dissipation matrix, Hamiltonian, and input mapping using dedicated KAN blocks, while enforcing the port-Hamiltonian constraints by construction. This yields constitutive representations in which the nonlinear functions defining the identified pH components can be explicitly inspected, leading to a more interpretable model than with standard MLP-based parameterizations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

URDF Synthesis from RGB-D Sequences via Differentiable Joint Inference and Energy-Consistent Verification

Authors:

Reconstructing simulation-ready digital twins of articulated objects from sensor observations remains constrained by two persistent gaps: (i) part-level geometric reconstruction is decoupled from kinematic-parameter estimation, and (ii) the recovered models often violate basic dynamic invariants such as energy conservation, leading to drift when the URDF is replayed in physics simulators. We present KinemaForge, a constraint-driven pipeline that jointly infers part-level shape, joint topology, and joint parameters from short RGB-D sequences and validates the result against an energy-consistent verifier built on differentiable rigid-body dynamics. The pipeline introduces three components: a kinematic constraint graph that encodes joint-part incidences as soft edges; a differentiable screw-axis solver that backpropagates from rendered observations through Featherstone's articulated-body algorithm to joint parameters; and an energy residual loss that penalises non-physical free responses of the reconstructed model. Across five PartNet-Mobility categories and an internal RGB-D benchmark, KinemaForge reduces the average joint-axis error from 4.52 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-37.4%) over the strongest geometric baseline (PARIS) and from 5.30 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-46.6%) over the interaction-based Ditto baseline, lowers long-horizon simulation drift by 64% (vs. PARIS) over 50 s rollouts, and yields URDFs whose closed-loop manipulation success rate improves by 14.6 percentage points over Ditto in our preliminary evaluation. Code and reconstruction data will be released upon acceptance.

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

Comprehensive pKa Data Augmentation from Limited Real Data through an Engineered Models-Quantum Framework

arXiv:2606.17077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proton dissociation constants (pKa) are critical for functional molecule discovery and molecular modeling. Building on iBonD, the largest experimental pKa database established, we and other researchers have developed several methods including machine-learning-based empirical prediction and high-accuracy energy calculations. Despite this foundation, the rapid augmentation of high-quality pKa data remains fundamentally constrained. As part of this work, we performed large-scale regression-based pKa prediction on unlabeled molecular datasets using a collection of extensively optimized machine-learning models. The results indicate that, since the feature distributions of unlabeled molecular datasets, the pKa data distribution approximates normality, with extreme scarcity of tail-region samples. Although such augmentation is highly valuable for improving overall data availability and predictive modeling, it remains insufficient for efficiently discovering molecules with broad-spectrum pKa properties. To address this, we explore the targeted generation of molecules with sparse pKa properties from the vast chemical space. Given that traditional continuous latent space VAE-RNN methods for molecular generation suffer from insufficient stability and fail to demonstrate clear advantages in complementing sparse data, we design and implement a quantum-assisted sparse-pKa molecular generation. Feasibility is validated on a simulated quantum annealer, and superior extreme-value sampling is further achieved on physical coherent Ising machines (CIMs). (to be continued)

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

DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

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

XRDiff: Crystal Structure Prediction from Powder X-Ray Diffraction Data Using Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.14003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the crystal structure of a material from its powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) pattern is a central challenge in materials science. PXRD is an accessible and widely used characterization technique, yet recovering the atomic structure from diffraction data requires solving an underdetermined inverse problem due to the loss of phase information. Generative modeling can provide a prior over atomic structure and learn the mapping from PXRD patterns to crystal structures via simulated structure-spectrum pairs. We present XRDiff, a diffusion model that recovers crystal structures from PXRD given either the stoichiometry or, in a more challenging setting, the elemental constituents and total number of atoms in the unit cell. We evaluate on datasets where each stoichiometry has multiple polymorphs and all polymorphs of a given composition are held out together, ensuring that high performance reflects genuine use of the diffraction signal. XRDiff achieves strong structure recovery rates on simulated benchmarks, indicating that the model learns a spectrum-to-structure mapping precise enough to differentiate between polymorphs. To address generalization to experimental data, we compare a full-spectrum encoding against an encoding based on peak descriptors. The peak-based encoding generalizes substantially better, outperforming even a model trained on full spectra with augmentations fitted to the experimental noise distribution. These results demonstrate that representations robust to the noise and artifacts present in real-world PXRD offer a practical and scalable path toward closing the simulation-to-experiment gap, enabling zero-shot crystal structure solution from experimental PXRD with full or partial chemical composition input.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

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

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Edge Flow: A Tractable and Predictive Continuous-Time Model for Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability

Authors:

arXiv:2606.18080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent in deep learning may operate at the edge of stability (EoS), a regime in which the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. Classical analysis tools such as gradient flow and the descent lemma do not apply here, motivating the search for a continuous-time model valid at EoS. We propose Edge Flow, a system of three coupled ordinary differential equations that provides a tractable, faithful, and predictive model of gradient descent dynamics at EoS. Edge Flow decomposes the dynamics into a center, an oscillation direction, and an oscillation magnitude. The center follows a modified gradient flow on a symmetrized loss; the direction tracks a top eigenvector of the Hessian via Rayleigh quotient dynamics; and the magnitude grows or decays exponentially depending on whether the sharpness exceeds or falls below the threshold $2/\eta$. Crucially, sharpness stabilization emerges from the coupled dynamics via a self-stabilization feedback loop. Discretizing Edge Flow only requires two gradient evaluations and one Hessian–vector product at each iteration. We demonstrate empirically that Edge Flow tracks the dynamics of gradient descent at least as faithfully as previously proposed continuous-time EoS models, while in addition resolving the oscillation of the sharpness at the onset of EoS, and that it provides a principled framework for understanding and mitigating instabilities in this regime.

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

Identifying Structural Biases from Causal Mechanism Shifts

arXiv:2606.18834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods commonly assume that all data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and that there are no unmeasured variables affecting the system. In practice, these assumptions are often violated, leading to inaccurate inference. In this paper, we study how to identify hidden confounding and selection biases from causal mechanism shifts. In particular, we show that structural biases lead to dependent mechanism shifts. That is, by considering for which variables the mechanisms change given data from different environments, we can tell which variables are unbiased, which are subject to hidden confounding, and which are undergoing selection bias. We formalize this into an empirically testable criterion based on mutual information, and show under which conditions it identifies structural biases. To tell which nodes are subject to what kind of bias, we introduce the StruBI algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that StruBI works well in practice, accurately recovering affected variable sets and types of biases, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Finding Multiple Interpretations in Datasets

arXiv:2606.12277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose an approach to finding sets of similar-performing models (in terms of loss/accuracy measurements) with highly different context-aware characteristics. Through experiments on the METABRIC dataset, we show that the proposed method finds multiple models with highly different gene expressions than those found by the control methodology without performance penalties. We argue that the proposed methodology is important whenever one aims to analyze any global characteristic of a model to extract insight into the underlying phenomenon being studied.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAE Interventions are Unreliable: Post-Intervention Recovery of Suppressed Behavior

arXiv:2606.18322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose residual-stream activations into interpretable features. Recent latent-space defenses increasingly rely on these decompositions, assuming that identified "unsafe" SAE features serve as actionable handles for monitoring and intervention. In this paradigm, clamping a specific harmful feature is expected to reliably prevent model misbehavior. However, we show that this success may hide a recoverable failure mode: the clamp may block one visible route to a behavior without eliminating the behavior itself. We formulate this vulnerability as post-intervention recovery, a constrained residual-space optimization problem. Starting from the post-intervention residual state, we optimize residual perturbations to recover the pre-intervention behavior while preserving the post-intervention values of the targeted SAE features. Even under a strong threat model where the intervention remains active throughout optimization and generation, recovery remains possible. To rule out that recovery simply undoes the intervention, we use encoder-orthogonal updates for single-layer interventions and the corresponding feature-map Jacobian in the cross-layer setting. Across TPP, unlearning, IOI, and refusal steering experiments, this stress test reveals recoverable behavior despite successful feature-level intervention. Especially in the safety-critical refusal-steering setting, we achieve a 95.8% recovery rate on valid samples while keeping defended-feature relative drift to 0.131, substantially below suffix-based baselines. A recovery-path attribution analysis further localizes this recovery to the SAE reconstruction residual, the component left unexplained by the SAE. These results expose a gap between feature-level control and behavioral completeness: SAE features can support causal intervention, but controlling them does not guarantee control over the underlying behavior.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

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

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Entanglement Degree, Mean Positronium Lifetime, and the $3\gamma$/$2\gamma$ Annihilation-Rate Ratio as Novel PET Biomarkers for Hypoxia – Concept, Challenges, and Predictions

Authors:

arXiv:2605.00021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript introduces a novel method to assess tissue oxygen concentration via the quantum entanglement (QE) of photons originating from positronium which is produced within the patient's body during positron emission tomography. We also investigate the possibility of assessing hypoxia by simultaneously detecting positronium lifetime and the positronium decay rate ratio. We introduce two distinct quantum sensing approaches. Method 1 utilizes the correlation between oxygen concentration and ortho-positronium (o-Ps) decay rates, relying on the simultaneous measurement of the mean o-Ps lifetime ($\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$) and the $3\gamma$-to-$2\gamma$ annihilation rate ratio of o-Ps ($R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$). Method 2 introduces a novel hypothesis: that the degree of QE is sensitive to the relative contribution of annihilation mechanisms (pick-off vs. conversion), which in turn depends on oxygen concentration. We derive a formula for partial pressure of oxygen ($p\mathrm{O}_2$) as a function of $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$ and $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and estimate the measurement accuracy required for these parameters - and for the degree of QE - to sense in-vivo oxygen pressure in the range between hypoxic and physoxic conditions. Theoretical models and quantitative estimates for $R_{\mathrm{oPs-3\gamma/2\gamma}}$, $\tau_{\mathrm{oPs}}$ and for the degree of QE ($C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ ) as a function of $p\mathrm{O}_2$ are provided for water, isopropanol, cyclohexane, isooctane, and adipose tissue. In particular, applying the formulas derived under the working hypothesis that in pick-off process the photons are not entangled, we estimated that for $p\mathrm{O}_2 = 0$, the degree of quantum entanglement $C_{\mathrm{QE}}$ is equal to 0.890 for adipose, 0.886 for isopropanol, 0.867 for water, 0.818 for cyclohexane, and 0.784 for isooctane.

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

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks Through Feature Engineering

arXiv:2502.07209v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) seek to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) with deep learning. Mainstream approaches that deploy fully-connected multi-layer deep learning architectures require prolonged training to achieve even moderate accuracy, while recent work on feature engineering allows higher accuracy and faster convergence. This paper introduces SAFE-NET, a Single-layered Adaptive Feature Engineering NETwork that achieves orders-of-magnitude lower errors with far fewer parameters than baseline feature engineering methods. SAFE-NET returns to basic ideas in machine learning, using Fourier features, a simplified single hidden layer network architecture, and an effective optimizer that improves the conditioning of the PINN optimization problem. Numerical results show that SAFE-NET converges faster and typically outperforms deeper networks and more complex architectures. It consistently uses fewer parameters – on average, 65% fewer than the competing feature engineering methods – while achieving comparable accuracy in less than 30% of the training epochs. Moreover, each SAFE-NET epoch is 95% faster than those of competing feature engineering approaches. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that modern PINNs effectively learn features in these scientific applications and highlight the efficiency gains possible through feature engineering.

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

LLMs Can Better Capture Human Judgments–With the Right Prompts

Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Asymmetric and chiral dynamics of two-component anyons with synthetic gauge flux

arXiv:2512.19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics in a one-dimensional two-component anyon-Hubbard model, which can be mapped to an extended Bose-Hubbard ladder with density-dependent hopping phase and synthetic gauge flux. Through numerical simulations of two-particle dynamics and the symmetry analysis, we reveal the asymmetric transport with broken inversion symmetry and two dynamical symmetries in the expansion dynamics. The expansion of two-component anyons is dynamically symmetric under spatial inversion and component flip, when the sign of anyonic statistics phase or the signs of gauge flux and interaction are changed. In the non-interacting case, we show the dynamical suppression induced by both the statistics phase and gauge flux. In the interacting case, we demonstrate that both chiral and antichiral dynamics can be exhibited and tuned by the statistics phase and gauge flux. The dynamical phase regimes with respect to the chiral-antichiral dynamics are obtained. These findings highlight the rich dynamical phenomena arising from the interplay of anyonic exchange statistics, synthetic gauge fields, and interactions in multi-component anyons.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.