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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

An adaptive framework for the axisymmetric pulsar magnetosphere using physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks

arXiv:2606.10686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pulsar magnetosphere has only recently been addressed using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), by deploying a domain-decomposition approach and treating the separatrix and equatorial current sheet as infinitesimally thin discontinuities. However, this baseline requires extensive manual hyperparameter tuning, achieves limited final accuracy and demands several hours of training. We refine this framework by introducing domain-specific neural architectures based on Kolmogorov-Arnold networks, an automated adaptive training pipeline and a physics-based convergence criterion that eliminate the need for manual calibration. The proposed methodology delivers self-consistent axisymmetric magnetosphere solutions with mean squared errors of the PDE residuals at O(1e-6) in double precision - an improvement of two orders of magnitude over the baseline - while achieving convergence in under 20 minutes in single precision. Importantly, the method reliably resolves stellar radii reduced by up to 80% compared to the baseline, overcoming the severe spatial scale disparities that also challenge traditional solvers. Furthermore, by varying the flux that opens to infinity, we provide a correction to the equation that connects it to the equatorial T-point's position. The complete framework is released as the open-source library PulsarX.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fast Adiabatic Quantum Gates via Hyperfine Intermediate States

arXiv:2606.11655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The appeal of adiabatic quantum computing lies in its intrinsic robustness against various technical imperfections, making it attractive for many quantum information applications. However, it faces a fundamental challenge: accelerating the adiabatic operations while preserving adiabaticity within the qubit coherence time. In this article, we propose an electromagnetically induced transparency-based adiabatic CNOT gate protocol which harnesses atomic hyperfine intermediate states (HISs) to speed up the adiabatic evolution. The HISs, naturally-existed in two-photon transitions, often need to be suppressed due to their significant decay errors. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel method that utilizes appropriately chosen HISs not only to enhance the adiabaticity in STAY pathway but also to accelerate the population transfer in TRANSFER pathway. Through pulse optimization, we achieve adiabatic gate fidelities exceeding 0.9991 within 0.3903 {\mu}s in realistic Cs atomic setups. To demonstrate the generality of protocol we further assess the impact of decays from multiple HIS and extend our model to arbitrary number of states, providing a practical route toward fast and robust adiabatic quantum gates in Rydberg-atom platforms.

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

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

arXiv:2606.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of $\langle$query, evidence chunk, answer$\rangle$ triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Interpretation as Linear Transformation: A Cognitive-Geometric Model of Concepts and Meaning

arXiv:2512.09831v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper develops a geometric framework for modeling concepts, motivation, and influence across cognitively heterogeneous agents. Each agent is represented by a personalized value space, a vector space encoding the internal dimensions through which the agent interprets and evaluates meaning. Evaluative concepts are formalized as structured vectors, abstract beings, whose transmission is mediated by linear interpretation maps. An abstract being survives communication only if it avoids the null spaces of these maps, yielding a structural criterion for intelligibility, miscommunication, and concept death. Within this framework, I show how conceptual distortion, motivational drift, and the limits of mutual understanding arise from purely algebraic constraints. A central result, the No-Null-Space Leadership Condition, characterizes leadership as a property of representational reachability rather than persuasion or authority. More broadly, the model explains how abstract beings can propagate, mutate, or disappear as they traverse diverse cognitive geometries. The account unifies insights from conceptual spaces, social epistemology, and AI value alignment by grounding meaning preservation in structural compatibility rather than shared information or rationality. I argue that this cognitive-geometric perspective clarifies the epistemic boundaries of influence in both human and artificial systems, and offers a general foundation for analyzing conceptual dynamics across heterogeneous agents.

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

Divide, Deliberate, Decide: A Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Egocentric Action Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition in egocentric video is challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs): actions often differ only in small visual cues, and a single model tends to be biased toward a subset of these cues. We propose Divide, Deliberate, Decide, a fully-local, zero-shot multi-agent framework in which (i) a VLM orchestrator chunks the video and proposes a top-k candidate label list per segment, (ii) an ensemble of heterogeneous VLM specialists, drawn from different open model families, engages in a structured deliberation that includes a peer-consultation round of questions, and (iii) agent rankings are aggregated with a Borda count and the orchestrator re-ranks its own prediction in light of the specialists' evidence. The entire pipeline runs locally with no fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method positively improves zero-shot action recognition performance over the baseline, highlighting the influence of a heterogeneous deliberation step, showing that the gain stems from decorrelated model priors rather than from additional compute.

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

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Three non-Hermitian random matrix universality classes of complex edge statistics: Spacing ratios and distributions

arXiv:2603.28457v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The conjectured three generic local bulk statistics amongst all non-Hermitian random matrix symmetry classes have recently been extended to three generic local edge statistics. We study analytically and numerically complex spacing ratios and nearest-neighbour (NN) spacing distributions that characterise such local statistics. We choose the three simplest representatives of these universality classes, given by the Gaussian ensembles of complex Ginibre, complex symmetric and complex self-dual matrices, denoted by class A, AI$^\dag$ and AII$^\dag$. In the first part, we analytically study the complex spacing ratio in class A, at finite matrix size $N$. Introducing a conditional point process, we simplify existing expressions and show why an uncontrolled approximation introduced earlier converges well in the large-$N$ limit in the bulk. When specifying to the elliptic Ginibre ensemble, we present a parameter-dependent $N=3$ surmise for the complex spacing ratio, interpolating to that of the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), where such a surmise is very accurate. In the second numerical part, we compare complex spacing ratios, its moments, and NN spacing distributions for all three ensembles with that of uncorrelated points, the two-dimensional (2D) Poisson process, both in the bulk and at the edge. The varying degree of repulsion within these different edge universality classes can be well understood in terms of an effective 2D Coulomb gas description, at different values of inverse temperature $\beta$. We find indications that the complex spacing ratio does not fully unfold the local statistics at the edge. Finally we verify that for small argument, in all three symmetry classes the NN spacing distributions in the bulk and at the edge are consistent with the universal cubic repulsion.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

iTryOn: Mastering Interactive Video Virtual Try-On with Spatial-Semantic Guidance

Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) aims to seamlessly replace a garment on a person in a video with a new one. While existing methods have made significant strides in maintaining temporal consistency, they are predominantly confined to non-interactive scenarios where models merely showcase garments. This limitation overlooks a crucial aspect of real-world apparel presentation: active human-garment interaction. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formalize a new challenging task: Interactive Video Virtual Try-On (Interactive VVT), where subjects in the video actively engage with their clothing. This task introduces unique challenges beyond simple texture preservation, including: (1) resolving the semantic ambiguity of interactions from standard pose information, and (2) learning complex garment deformations from video where interactive moments are sparse and brief. To address these challenges, we propose iTryOn, a novel framework built upon a large-scale video diffusion Transformer. iTryOn pioneers a multi-level interaction injection mechanism to guide the generation of complex dynamics. At the spatial level, we introduce a garment-agnostic 3D hand prior to provide fine-grained guidance for precise hand-garment contact, effectively resolving spatial ambiguity. At the semantic level, iTryOn leverages global captions for overall context and time-stamped action captions for localized interactions, synchronized via our novel Action-aware Rotational Position Embedding (A-RoPE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that iTryOn not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on traditional VVT benchmarks but also establishes a commanding lead in the new interactive setting, marking a significant step towards more dynamic and controllable virtual try-on experiences.

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

Blind Dexterous Grasping via Real2Sim2Real Tactile Policy Learning

arXiv:2606.11767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind grasping with a dexterous hand is a crucial manipulation capability. Nevertheless, learning such tactile-only policies for real robots remains challenging due to the tactile sim-to-real gap and the limited expressiveness of sparse tactile signals. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for tactile-only blind grasping that is deployable on a physical multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach combines three key components. First, we introduce a Real2Sim tactile calibration pipeline that constructs a contact-calibrated digital-twin simulator capable of reproducing real tactile signals. Second, we improve the expressiveness of sparse tactile observations using a layout-aware tactile encoder, which incorporates sensor-geometry priors through self-supervised pretraining. Third, to improve generalization to unseen objects, we train object-specific reinforcement-learning experts in the calibrated simulator and aggregate their successful grasp trajectories into a tactile-conditioned Diffusion Policy. We evaluate our method on a physical LEAP Hand equipped with distributed tactile sensing across 10 seen and 10 unseen objects. The deployed policy achieves a 27\% real-world grasp success rate across all 20 objects, without real-world grasping demonstrations or visual input. Simulation ablations show that layout-aware tactile pretraining improves grasping performance, while sensing-level evaluations confirm that Real2Sim calibration increases the consistency of tactile contact events between simulation and hardware. Together, these results suggest that contact-event calibration, geometry-aware tactile representation learning, and diffusion-based policy aggregation provide an effective path toward tactile-only blind grasping on real dexterous robotic hands. Project page:Dex-Blind-Grasp.github.io.

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

Maturing Markov Decision Processes: Decision Making under Increasing Information and Shrinking Action Sets

arXiv:2606.18820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision problems often exhibit an asymmetric evolution of information and decision flexibility: as a decision cycle unfolds, the agent receives richer information while feasible actions expire due to operational cutoffs, commitments, or resource constraints. Standard MDP formulations typically flatten this structure into stage-dependent state descriptions and action masks, thereby obscuring the nested information–action asymmetry that determines which decisions are urgent and which can be deferred. We introduce Maturing Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs), a formulation built around this information–action asymmetry. We characterize one of its key consequences through an expiring-action priority principle, which identifies the actions that must be resolved before the next stage. Motivated by this structure, we develop a structure-aware reinforcement learning framework with stage-aware policy design, expiring-action abstraction, and search-augmented learning with distillation. Experiments on a controlled multi-supplier replenishment problem, simplified cash-management environments of increasing complexity, and a production-scale simulator show that explicitly modeling this asymmetry improves learning efficiency and becomes increasingly valuable as decision problems scale.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

CrossFusion: A Multi-Scale Cross-Attention Convolutional Fusion Model for Cancer Survival Prediction

Cancer survival prediction from whole slide images (WSIs) is a challenging task in computational pathology due to the large size, irregular shape, and high granularity of the WSIs. These characteristics make it difficult to capture the full spectrum of patterns, from subtle cellular abnormalities to complex tissue interactions, which are crucial for accurate prognosis. To address this, we propose CrossFusion, a novel multi-scale feature integration framework that extracts and fuses information from patches across different magnification levels. By effectively modeling both scale-specific patterns and their interactions, CrossFusion generates a rich feature set that enhances survival prediction accuracy. We validate our approach across six cancer types from public datasets, demonstrating significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, when coupled with domain-specific feature extraction backbones, our method shows further gains in prognostic performance compared to general-purpose backbones. The source code is available at: https://github.com/RustinS/CrossFusion

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

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum-inspired Topographic Stereovision

arXiv:2606.02197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the conventional triangulation in distant stereovision, when shape rather than distance is the relevant observable. We show through the information-regret analysis that the optimal measurements for absolute distance and relative topography are unexpectedly different and incompatible, exposing an observable-measurement mismatch. To resolve this, we introduce stereo regularization to address stereo anisotropies that violate prevailing emitter-number conservation. Accordingly, we propose a topographic interferometer, which exploits cross-detector correlations to probe topography without measuring the distance profile. Our Fizeau-imaging interferometer turns parallax paths into Mach-Zehnder arms and employs a central path as the local oscillator for balanced homodyne detection, saturating the quantum Fisher information with improved topographic error scaling. This enables topographic stereovision of thermal sources beyond the Rayleigh limit, with feasible experimental demonstrations within existing techniques for remote sensing and astronomy.

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

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

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Beyond the canonical: The role of post-transcriptional regulation in drug-target interaction prediction

by Md Istiaq Ansari, Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed, Debby D. Wang, Kirill Medvedev, Wei Zhang Protein isoforms produced from the same gene through post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as alternative splicing, can substantially alter protein structure and function, including drug-binding properties. However, most existing drug-target interaction (DTI) and drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction models rely exclusively on a single representative protein sequence per gene, typically the canonical or longest isoform, thereby overlooking the functional diversity introduced by alternative isoforms. This assumption can introduce bias, limit generalizability, and compromise the biological validity of model predictions. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of protein isoform variation on DTI prediction accuracy. Our results show that substituting the canonical sequence with an alternative isoform often leads to substantial declines in predictive performance. Structural and binding affinity analyses further reveal that these discrepancies are frequently associated with changes in predicted binding-site configurations, which we further examine through controlled perturbations of binding-site residues. These experiments suggest that even subtle alterations in binding regions can lead to inconsistent DTI predictions. Overall, our findings uncover a critical limitation in current DTI modeling frameworks and underscore the importance of incorporating isoform-specific information to better reflect biological reality and improve therapeutic relevance. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/DTIVariant.

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

REFLEX: Reflective Evolution from LLM Experience

Authors:

Large multimodal language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for guiding evolutionary search toward interpretable programmatic policies. However, existing frameworks rely on a monolithic model call to simultaneously interpret visual behavioral evidence and synthesize corrective code. This diagnosis-repair entanglement creates an opaque feedback loop, obscuring the rationale behind mutations and preventing the retention of algorithmic insights across independent runs. To achieve auditable and efficient policy search, we argue that visual diagnosis must be structurally decoupled from code generation. We present REFLEX, a train-free evolutionary framework that operationalizes this decoupling. In REFLEX, a vision-enabled Critic first distills task-specific behavioral evidence into structured, auditable diagnoses. Subsequently, a text-optimized Actor synthesizes child policies using these diagnoses alongside a persistent, self-evolving Skill Memory of reusable code snippets. This architecture not only provides transparent mutation traces but also enables cross-run programmatic knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations across control benchmarks (Lunar Lander, Acrobot, Pendulum) and a 36-dimensional antenna array synthesis task demonstrate exceptional sample efficiency. Notably, REFLEX solves Acrobot and Pendulum in under 10 LLM calls and reaches a best Normalized Weighted Score of 1.092 on Lunar Lander, achieving highly competitive final performance while significantly accelerating the early-stage discovery of transparent policies.

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

Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation

arXiv:2507.09839v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model behavior. Recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods iteratively refine prompts using model-generated critiques (often called textual gradients), but they predominantly optimize from failures and underutilize information contained in correct predictions, leading to instability and semantic drift. We propose TRAS (Textual Regularization with Aggregated Signals), a feedback-centric framework that is plug-and-play with existing APO search backbones. It retains the standard textual gradient signal from prior work for error correction and introduces a complementary textual regularizer derived from successful predictions to preserve beneficial prompt components. Because both signals are stochastic and can be noisy, we further introduce Monte Carlo Signal Aggregation (MCSA), which samples multiple gradients or regularizers and aggregates them into a single actionable directive, emphasizing consistent, actionable advice while filtering out outliers. Motivated by rapid model churn, we also formalize Automatic Prompt Migration (APM), the practical problem of adapting an expert prompt across model versions or API providers without losing critical instructions. Across standard APO and APM scenarios, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding higher accuracy, faster convergence, and lower query cost, while substantially reducing the degradation observed under naive prompt migration.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

Authors:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Unruh vacuum: multi-time correlations in black hole collapse and evaporation

arXiv:2606.13383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The black hole information paradox originates from the thermal character of Hawking radiation, which appears to erase information about the collapsing matter. However, thermality constrains only observables defined at a single time and leaves the structure of temporal quantum correlations largely unexplored. Here we show that multi-time quantum-field correlations provide a concrete mechanism for the survival of pre-collapse information in black hole evaporation. Using a two-dimensional model of gravitational collapse and evaporation, we demonstrate that late-time multi-time correlations are not fully reproduced by the Unruh vacuum. In particular, they contain a contribution that depends explicitly on parameters characterizing the pre-collapse state, despite the thermal character of the asymptotic radiation. Our results identify measurable multi-time correlations as carriers of information in Hawking radiation and suggest that formulations of the black hole information paradox based solely on single-time observables are incomplete.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it difficult to compare their capabilities and understand the trade-offs they offer. In this work, we present a systematic experimental analysis of modern DLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight state-of-the-art DLMs across eight benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, translation, knowledge, and structured problem solving, while explicitly considering both generation quality and computational efficiency. Beyond downstream evaluation, we analyze the impact of key inference-time factors, including denoising steps, context length, block size, and parallel unmasking strategies, and complement large-scale experiments with controlled comparisons of smaller models trained under identical conditions. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of diffusion-based language modeling across different tasks, architectures, and inference budgets. We show that the behavior of DLMs is strongly influenced by generation-time design choices, leading to distinct trade-offs between performance and computational efficiency. Overall, our study provides practical insights into the capabilities and deployment characteristics of contemporary DLMs.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SurgAtlas: A Large-Scale Surgical Video-Language Dataset with 2,391 Hours of Open and Minimally Invasive Surgery

We introduce SurgAtlas, the largest surgical video-language dataset to date, comprising 15,291 videos (2,391 hours) spanning 18 surgical specialties and over 5,000 procedure types, sourced entirely from publicly available YouTube content. SurgAtlas is also the first surgical video-language dataset to include open surgery at scale, with 6,182 open procedure videos alongside over 9,000 minimally invasive recordings, and the first to establish standardized benchmarks for open-surgery video understanding. We additionally provide an expert-validated subset with verified visual question-answer pairs across diverse open and minimally invasive procedures, serving as a clinically grounded benchmark for surgical reasoning. Compared with existing surgical video-language datasets, SurgAtlas provides one of the most diverse annotation schemas, combining segment-level captions, step- and phase-level descriptions, video-level surgical descriptions, and reasoning-oriented question-answer pairs organized within a hierarchical taxonomy. These annotations are constructed through an automated multi-tier pipeline with LLM-based enrichment and a staged VQA generation framework with explicit groundedness verification. The scale and diversity of SurgAtlas enable training surgical foundation models with broad procedural coverage: we finetune Qwen3-VL-8B through a two-stage captioning-then-instruction pipeline and achieve competitive or state-of-the-art results on multiple established surgical benchmarks, including phase recognition, triplet detection, and reasoning question answering. More broadly, SurgAtlas provides a large native public video corpus that can support future large-scale pretraining of multimodal surgical AI systems and contribute to the development of next-generation foundation models for surgery.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fusion Learning from Dynamic Functional Connectivity: Combining the Amplitude and Phase of fMRI Signals to Identify Brain Disorders

arXiv:2603.24603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively utilized in brain science research. The sliding window correlation (SWC) method is a widely used approach for constructing dFC by computing correlation coefficients between amplitude time series of signals from pairs of brain regions. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that incorporates both amplitude and phase information of fMRI signals to improve the detection of brain disorders. Specifically, we introduce a multi-scale fusion learning framework, namely MSFL, which leverages two complementary dFC features derived from SWC and phase synchronization (PS). Here, SWC captures amplitude correlations, while PS measures phase coherence within dFC. We evaluated the efficacy of MSFL in classifying autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder using two publicly available datasets: ABIDE I and REST-meta-MDD, respectively. The results indicate that MSFL significantly outperforms existing comparative models. Moreover, we performed model explanation analysis using the SHAP framework, which showed that both types of dFC features from SWC and PS contribute to detecting brain disorders.