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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

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

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

arXiv:2606.11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries. We propose JailbreakOPT, a tool-assisted framework for improving iterative single-turn jailbreak prompt optimization. JailbreakOPT organizes diverse atomic jailbreak prompts into an attack tool library and composes them through a unified intra-episode optimization abstraction to generate stronger standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across attack episodes, JailbreakOPT further frames tool selection as a contextual bandit problem and applies contextual Thompson sampling to guide exploration and exploitation based on past outcomes. Experiments across multiple target LLMs and attack goals show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) while reducing the number of attacks until success (No.A) compared with atomic single-turn attacks and existing iterative optimization baselines. This paper may contain offensive or harmful content.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

arXiv:2606.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into clinical systems, making it essential to evaluate the real-world utility of these systems. However, static benchmarks tend to measure correctness rather than user acceptance, aggregate performance across queries, and require densely annotated datasets – leading to major blind spots for evaluating clinical systems. In this work, we perform a deployment-centered evaluation of an LLM system embedded within electronic health records at an academic medical center, where user feedback is sparse but closely reflects the deployment conditions. Specifically, we train a pre-response classifier that estimates the risk that a future interaction will result in the user rejecting the LLM response, based on query content and deployment-specific context available before generation. We conduct a prospective analysis of our model over 4.5 months of user feedback, finding that our prediction model achieves an AUROC of 0.719. Further, we estimate the benefit of such predictions in two downstream use cases (guardrail triggering and abstention). Our key conceptual insight is that making use of deployment-specific context (i.e., the provider type, department name, language model used for response), as opposed to only query content, improves the ability to predict whether the user will reject the system output. Altogether, our empirical case study demonstrates the feasibility of predicting user rejection using deployment-specific context, opening the door to targeted guardrails.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

arXiv:2606.18457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.

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

Propagating Collective Spin-valley Modes in Twisted WSe2

arXiv:2507.18770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of neutral collective modes is a hallmark of correlated quantum phases but is often challenging to probe experimentally. In two-dimensional flatband systems, charge responses have been intensively investigated yet neutral excitations remain largely unexplored. In particular, intervalley coherent state (IVC) features a neutral Goldstone mode due to spontaneously broken valley U(1) symmetry. While IVC state has been proposed as a unifying theme across graphene and semiconductor based systems, its defining feature, the neutral Goldstone mode, remains elusive in experiment. Here we investigate space and time resolved transport of neutral modes in twisted WSe2 moire superlattices through a novel ultrafast imaging technique. We uncover two new propagating collective modes with very different velocities, which emerge near the van Hove singularity (VHS) in both intermediate (3.5 to 4 degree) and large (around 5 degree) angle twisted WSe2. The fast-propagating mode has a large speed of about 3 km/s and is consistent with a Goldstone mode for an IVC state, while the slow-moving mode is likely a gapped amplitude mode. They can be understood as the spin-valley analogues of collective modes of a superfluid, whose propagation is imaged for the first time in a condensed matter system. Our study demonstrates a powerful new approach for probing charge-neutral modes in quantum materials and offers key insights into the interplay between charge and spin-valley physics in moire superlattices.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Sharp analysis of linear ensemble sampling

arXiv:2602.08026v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse linear ensemble sampling (ES) with standard Gaussian perturbations in stochastic linear bandits. We show that for ensemble size $m=\Theta(d\log n)$, ES attains $\tilde O(d^{3/2}\sqrt n)$ high-probability regret, closing the gap to the Thompson sampling benchmark while keeping computation comparable. The proof brings a new perspective on randomized exploration in linear bandits by reducing the analysis to a time-uniform exceedance problem for $m$ independent Brownian motions. This continuous-time lens appears particularly natural here: it yields an exact representation of the relevant discrete-time processes, and we do not know another route to a sharp ES bound.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Early Prediction of Severe Acute Pancreatitis: A Multi-Model Study Using the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification

Authors:

**Background:** Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a common gastrointestinal emergency with a subset of patients progressing to severe acute pancreatitis (SAP), which carries substantial morbidity and mortality. Current clinical severity scores such as BISAP, APACHE II, Ranson, and the Modified CT Severity Index require upon 48 hours of observation before reliable assessment is possible, limiting early triage. Machine learning (ML) approaches using routine admission laboratory values may enable earlier, more accurate prediction. **Methods:** We evaluated 11 models spanning three architectural families classical ML (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting), feedforward deep learning (MLP, Residual MLP, Attention MLP), and recurrent deep learning (LSTM, Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, LSTM+Attention, CNN-LSTM) on a Chinese AP cohort of 722 patients (585 severe, 137 mild) labelled according to the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification. Performance was assessed via 5-fold stratified cross-validation using AUC-ROC, F1 score, sensitivity, specificity, and PPV, with decision thresholds optimised for maximal F1. **Results:** Random Forest achieved the highest AUC of 0.877 (F1=0.917, sensitivity=96.8%, PPV=87.1%), followed closely by Gradient Boosting (AUC=0.874, F1=0.918). Classical ML models consistently outperformed deep learning counterparts. CNN-LSTM was the best recurrent model (AUC=0.777) but remained inferior to all classical approaches. LSTM-family models produced AUC values of 0.684-0.777, reflecting the cross-sectional tabular nature of the data. **Conclusions:** Random Forest provides robust, high-sensitivity early prediction of SAP severity using routine admission data. External prospective validation is required before clinical deployment. **Keywords:** acute pancreatitis; severity prediction; machine learning; random forest; deep learning; LSTM; Revised Atlanta Classification; early triage

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

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

RankVR: Low-Rank Structure Perception and Value Recalibration for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) constitutes a pivotal paradigm requiring models to perform joint reasoning on reference images and modification texts. However, the prevalence of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) in large-scale datasets severely constrains model performance. Existing denoising methods either target binary mismatches or rely on scalar-based point-wise estimation, neglecting rich global structural correlations among sample populations and dynamic value variations during training, thereby yielding suboptimal results. This paper identifies two critical unresolved challenges: Global Structural Inconsistency of Semantic Correlations and Hard Sample Discrimination Uncertainty. To address these, we propose RankVR, a framework designed to construct a robust CIR model via global structure consistency and dynamic value perception. Specifically, we introduce the Global Structure Consistency Perception (GSCP) module, which utilizes the Effective Rank of the Correlation Matrix to decouple clean samples from structural noise. By measuring rank difference, GSCP identifies samples disrupting macroscopic semantic symmetry. Furthermore, we develop the Adaptive Semantic Value Calibration (ASVC) module to distinguish high-value hard clean samples. By integrating training potential and reliability, it dynamically quantifies the semantic value of each triplet, ensuring effective utilization of hard samples while suppressing noise characterized by logical conflicts. Extensive experiments on the FashionIQ and CIRR benchmark datasets demonstrate that RankVR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its superior robustness in noisy environments.

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

Plug-and-Play image restoration with Stochastic deNOising REgularization

Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms that address image inverse problems by combining a physical model and a deep neural network for regularization. Even if they produce impressive image restoration results, these algorithms rely on a non-standard use of a denoiser on images that are less and less noisy along the iterations, which contrasts with recent algorithms based on Diffusion Models (DM), where the denoiser is applied only on re-noised images. We propose a new PnP framework, called Stochastic deNOising REgularization (SNORE), which applies the denoiser only on images with noise of the adequate level. It is based on an explicit stochastic regularization, which leads to a stochastic gradient descent algorithm to solve ill-posed inverse problems. A convergence analysis of this algorithm and its annealing extension is provided. Experimentally, we prove that SNORE is competitive with respect to state-of-the-art methods on deblurring and inpainting tasks, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Steady-state entanglement of spin qubits mediated by nonreciprocal and chiral magnons

arXiv:2509.13094v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a hybrid quantum system in which a magnet supporting non-reciprocal magnons, chiral magnons, or both mediates the dissipative and unidirectional coupling of spin qubits. By driving the qubits, the steady state of this qubit-qubit coupling scheme becomes the maximally entangled Bell state. We devise a protocol where the system converges to this entangled state and benchmark it including qubit decay and dephasing. The protocol is numerically tested on a hybrid system consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers coupled to magnon surface modes of an yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film. We show that the dephasing time of the NV centers forms the bottleneck for achieving the entanglement of NV centers separated by a distance within the magnon coherence length. Our findings identify the key technological requirements and demonstrate a viable route toward steady-state entanglement of solid-state spins over distances of several microns using magnonic quantum networks, expanding the toolbox of magnonics for quantum information purposes.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Anterior-superior hypothalamic enlargement as specific marker in episodic migraine: converging evidence from an independent discovery-replication design

Background: Growing evidence implicates the hypothalamus as a key structure in migraine pathophysiology; however, our understanding of its precise role and of the specific nuclei involved remains limited. We combined MRI data from our laboratory with publicly available MRI datasets from OpenNeuro to examine hypothalamic subunit volumes in episodic migraine and assess the specificity of these alterations relative to chronic pain conditions. Methods: Structural MRI combined with an automated atlas-based segmentation algorithm and a discovery-replication design was employed to investigate cross-sectional volumetric differences across 5 bilateral hypothalamic subunits in two independent migraine cohorts: DS1-MIG (DS1-MIG-base, n = 111 patients, n = 35 controls) and DS2-MIG (n = 27 patients, n = 31 controls). The adjusted volumes were compared between groups using MANOVA as an omnibus test, followed by Welch t-tests to test univariate follow-up. Longitudinal volumetric changes were additionally assessed in DS1-MIG participants with available follow-up scans using linear mixed models. To assess the specificity of findings to migraine, the same pipeline was applied to two chronic pain datasets, one including patients with fibromyalgia (DS-FM, n = 33 patients, n = 33 controls) and the other including patients with trigeminal neuralgia (n = 119 patients, n = 55 controls). Results: MANOVA revealed significant multivariate group differences in the discovery and replication migraine cohorts (DS1-MIG-base: = .006; DS2-MIG: = .008). Follow-up univariate analyses identified a consistent enlargement of the left anterior-superior subunit across both cohorts (FDR = .023 in DS1-MIG-base and FDR = .046 in DS2-MIG), representing the only cross-cohort replication finding. Beyond this shared signature, DS2-MIG exhibited additional significant enlargements of the right anterior-inferior and right tubular-inferior subunits. Longitudinal analyses in DS1-MIG showed that hypothalamic subunit volumes remained broadly stable over time within both migraine patients and control participants. No significant volumetric alterations were detected in the fibromyalgia or trigeminal neuralgia cohorts, either in multivariate or univariate analyses, underscoring migraine-specific findings. Conclusions: These findings provide evidence for subunit-specific hypothalamic structural alterations in migraine localized in the left anterior hypothalamic subunit. The stability of these differences over time and their absence in other chronic pain conditions suggest a migraine-specific structural organisation of hypothalamic circuitry.

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

How Should World Models Be Evaluated? A Decision-Making-Centric Position

arXiv:2606.15032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI. Yet the term now refers to several different objects: action-conditioned environment models, latent imagination models, future-video predictors, interactive neural simulators, latent predictive representations, and synthetic-data engines. Evaluation has broadened with the term. Recent papers measure video realism, perceptual similarity, instruction following, physical plausibility, policy ranking, executability, planning success, and downstream policy improvement. The result is not only metric diversity but also a recurring problem of claim/evidence mismatch: papers frequently make a stronger claim about what their model is useful for than their evaluation can actually establish. This paper surveys the recent literature and argues that the central question is use-dependent. When a model is presented as a world model for embodied decision-making, a more decisive issue is not whether it generates visually compelling videos, but whether it supports reliable counterfactual reasoning, policy evaluation, planning, and policy optimization under intervention, policy-induced distribution shift, and long-horizon rollout. We organize the literature using an L0–L7 ladder that ranges from visual plausibility to policy optimization utility. In our interpretation, L0–L3 are most naturally read as diagnostics of generated artifacts, L4 is often the first genuinely interventional test, and L5–L7 provide the most direct evidence of decision usefulness. Based on this diagnosis, we propose a decision-making-centric evaluation framework and a benchmark protocol that foreground counterfactual action fidelity, closed-loop rollout validity, reward/value prediction, policy-ranking agreement, optimization lift, model exploitability, and uncertainty calibration.

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

Higher-Order Token Interactions via Quantum Attention

arXiv:2606.11673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard dot-product self-attention computes, in a single layer, only pairwise (order-2) interactions between tokens; representing a generic order-$k$ interaction is known to require either super-quadratic resources in one layer or composition across depth. We introduce Quantum Higher-Order Attention (QHA), a shallow, hardware-realizable quantum attention head that, via data re-uploading and an all-to-all non-Clifford entangler, synthesizes order-$k$ token interactions inside the circuit and exposes them through a local single-qubit read-out. We prove (i) an expressivity separation: any single standard self-attention layer with embedding dimension $m$, $H$ heads and $p$-bit precision satisfying $mHp=o(N/\log\log N)$ cannot represent the order-$k$ correlation family that one QHA head represents with circuit depth $O(\log k)$ ($O(k)$ two-qubit gates); and (ii) a trainability guarantee for its local-design instantiation: with a local read-out and $O(\log n)$ depth the gradient variance is $\Omega(1/\mathrm{poly}(n))$ (no barren plateau), which we confirm empirically – while being explicit that the more expressive all-to-all instantiation we benchmark is trained empirically and shows exponentially decaying gradients. Empirically, at a $6.5\times$ smaller parameter budget, QHA generalizes hidden-subset parity of every order $k\le6$ from disjoint inputs, whereas the larger classical attention head collapses past order~2; consistent with theory, the size of the advantage tracks the target's Fourier degree - largest for parity and shrinking when low-order structure is present. As an application, QHA serves as a compact high-order interaction detector across three domains - genetic epistasis, learning-parity-with-noise, and graph triangle detection - reaching the noise ceiling at the smallest parameter budget where field-standard linear methods fail.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

VideoWeave: Unlocking Geometric Consistency in Video Generation via Joint Geometry-Video Modeling

Large-scale video diffusion models often fail to preserve 3D structure over time, causing geometric drift and implausible motion under viewpoint changes. Existing methods usually enforce geometric consistency by using explicit geometry reconstructions, such as depth maps, point clouds, or reconstructed 3D structures, to define conditions, supervision, or reward signals, making the generator sensitive to errors from upstream geometry pipelines. We propose VideoWeave, a latent-space post-training framework that uses implicit geometry-model features to constrain the generative distribution, providing a more flexible and non-rigid form of guidance that mitigates the impact of reconstruction errors from geometry models. Specifically, VideoWeave adapts these features into geometry latents and jointly models them with video latents in a shared denoising space, allowing geometry to shape the generative distribution during training. To support this process, we build GeoVid-80K, an 80K-video dataset with paired appearance and geometry representations. Experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video generation show that VideoWeave improves geometric coherence while preserving strong visual quality. VideoWeave project page at https://videoweave.github.io/

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From 2D Grids to 1D Tokens: Reforming Shared Representations for Multimodal Image Fusion

Multimodal image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities into a fused image that preserves rich local details while maintaining globally consistent appearance. Existing approaches build shared representations on 2D feature grids, which excel at modeling local structures but offer limited leverage over image-level global appearance factors. To balance these objectives, we introduce a compact 1D token interface based on a frozen pretrained image tokenizer for modeling non-local appearance/base factors. Rather than using the tokenizer as a reconstruction backbone, our design uses the 1D token space as a global carrier while retaining the 2D spatial pathway for local structure restoration. Specifically, we introduce Selective Token Editing (STE), which sparsely updates/replaces a small set of critical tokens, providing a lightweight mechanism to steer global appearance coherence while keeping the fusion backbone unchanged and avoiding extra losses. Experiments on four commonly used benchmarks show that our method achieves the best overall performance, with consistent, multi-metric improvements in both global coherence and local fidelity. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/1D-Fusion-Project-Page/

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

Deterministic Integrity Gates for LLM-Assisted Clinical Manuscript Preparation: An Auditable Biomedical Informatics Architecture

arXiv:2606.09500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous research agents and AI co-scientist systems push large language models (LLMs) from drafting toward end-to-end manuscript production, the bottleneck shifts from generation to verification. Fluent LLM output can hide fabricated citations, numbers that drift from source tables, and unmet reporting-guideline items; existing tools generate without verifying, and self-critique inherits the blind spots that produce confident fabrication. We describe an architecture pairing generation with verification, resting on three principles: decompose the workflow into self-contained skills, gate every stage transition with halt-on-failure, and resolve each integrity question with the cheapest sufficient mechanism, a deterministic, re-executable check where one suffices and a prose-level probe only where interpretation is unavoidable. This determinism-where-possible split, organized as an integrity-gate taxonomy, is the core contribution. It is realized as MedSci Skills, an open-source toolkit of 43 skills with a 21-detector deterministic tier, evaluated on three public-dataset pipelines (STARD, PRISMA, STROBE) and a seeded-defect ablation. Across the three pipelines every content-hash manifest verified clean and the gates surfaced real defects; on 27 identical injected defects the deterministic gates detected all 27 with no false positives on the matched clean fixtures, whereas a single-prompt LLM reviewer detected 11, its misses in code, bibliography, and style defects the prose hides. Determinism-where-possible verification yields an auditable, re-executable trail that exposes the evidence a human needs to check an LLM-assisted manuscript: feasibility and reproducibility evidence, not a claim of human-competitive quality, which a separate blinded study addresses. MedSci Skills is MIT-licensed and archived (v3.8.0).

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Know Thy Reasoner: Not All Language Models Explore Alike

arXiv:2604.10827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Compute scaling for LLM reasoning trades off exploring solution approaches (breadth) against refining promising ones (depth), yet why a given trade-off works, and why it often fails to transfer across models, remains unclear. We argue that the optimal strategy depends on the model's diversity profile, the spread of probability mass across solution approaches, and that this must be characterized before any exploration strategy is adopted. We formalize this with a framework decomposing reasoning uncertainty, deriving when depth-based refinement outperforms parallel sampling, and validate it across three model families at both inference and training. Our central finding is that the diversity regime dictates the strategy: low-diversity aligned models benefit from depth-based refinement with lightweight intrinsic signals, whereas high-diversity base models are often harmed by it, and instead need breadth or stronger signals to compensate.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ZeroSyl: Simple Zero-Resource Syllable Tokenization for Spoken Language Modeling

Pure speech language models aim to learn language directly from raw audio without textual resources. A key challenge is that discrete tokens from self-supervised speech encoders result in excessively long sequences, motivating recent work on syllable-like units. However, methods like Sylber and SyllableLM rely on intricate multi-stage training pipelines. We propose ZeroSyl, a simple training-free method to extract syllable boundaries and embeddings directly from a frozen WavLM model. Using L2 norms of features in WavLM's intermediate layers, ZeroSyl achieves competitive syllable segmentation performance. The resulting segments are mean-pooled, discretized using K-means, and used to train a language model. ZeroSyl outperforms prior syllabic tokenizers across lexical, syntactic, and narrative benchmarks. Scaling experiments show that while finer-grained units are beneficial for lexical tasks, our discovered syllabic units exhibit better scaling behavior for syntactic modeling.

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

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

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

PiDA: Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation for Robust Vietnamese Speech Translation

Cascaded speech translation (ST) systems suffer from error propagation when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs incorrect transcripts. We present the first systematic categorization of ASR errors for Vietnamese ST, classifying substitution errors by phonetic cause and quantifying their impact on downstream Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performance using Linear Mixed-Effects Modelling. We confirm that most ASR substitution errors arise from phonetic confusions rather than random noise, and that these phonetic errors significantly degrade ST quality. Motivated by this finding, we propose Phonetically-Informed Data Augmentation (PiDA), which generates ASR-like corruptions by substituting words with phonetically similar alternatives using phonetic word embeddings. Fine-tuning on a PiDA-augmented version of FLEURS Vietnamese-English improves translation of erroneous ASR outputs (up to +2.04 BLEU over standard fine-tuning) while also slightly improving clean-text performance.