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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic epidemic model with varying infectivity and waning immunity: the law of large numbers with unbounded infectivity

arXiv:2606.11845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the large population limit of our epidemic model with infection age dependent infectivity and progressive immunity waning, under the assumption that the supremum in $t$ of the random infectivity function has a finite expectation, while the previous proofs assumed that this supremum admits a deterministic upper bound.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Engineering entanglement and transport in interacting quantum walks with tailored potentials

arXiv:2606.17825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the interplay between particle propagation and quantum correlation generation is a central challenge in quantum transport. Here, we investigate two distinguishable continuous-time quantum walkers evolving on parallel one-dimensional lattices, interacting via distance-dependent potentials. While on-site interactions reproduce the typical bosonic behaviour, extending the interaction to a linear potential over multiple neighbors introduces controlled Bloch-like oscillations and shifts the bound-pair regime to stronger couplings. More generally, we explore a Coulomb-like interaction parameterized by strength, spatial scaling, and decay rate. This reveals a rich phase diagram including four distinct dynamical regimes: (i) a high-entropy, oscillatory regime akin to a linear potential; (ii) a strongly localized, bound-pair regime; (iii) a novel intermediate regime combining near-ballistic spreading with strong correlations; and (iv) a weakly interacting, free-propagation regime. Notably, regime (iii) achieves concurrent optimization of transport efficiency and entanglement, offering a sweet spot for correlated quantum dynamics. Our results provide a tool for designing interaction-engineered quantum walks with potential applications in quantum information processing and simulations.

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

Ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of tetraphenylsubstituted nitrogen-based heterocycles

arXiv:2604.16897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tetraphenylpyrazine (TPP) and 2,3,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-pyrrole (TePP) are closely related heterocycles bearing four phenyl substituents, whose structural similarity makes them a useful pair for comparing how intramolecular flexibility influences excited-state relaxation and emission in the gas phase and in the solid state. TPP is a prototypical solid-state luminescence enhancement (SLE) emitter, exhibiting a markedly increased quantum yield upon molecular aggregation. In contrast, TePP displays similar quantum yields in solution and solid state, characteristic of dual-state emission (DSE). This behaviour indicates that intramolecular rotations are already significantly hindered in the isolated-molecule regime, consistent with our previous observations for TPP and other solid-state emitters (Hernández-Rodríguez et al., ChemPhysChem, 2024, 25, e202400563). To unravel the excited-state dynamics underlying this contrasting behaviour, we performed mixed quantum-classical trajectory simulations on a single molecule of TPP and TePP employing the surface-hopping method. Twelve singlet states were included at the TD-B3LYP-D3/def2-SVP level, which were previously benchmarked against coupled cluster methods. Simulated observables such as gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) and time-resolved fluorescence (TR-FL) signals allow us to dissect the distinct deactivation pathways operating in both systems in the gas phase, while also providing mechanistic insight into how these pathways are expected to evolve in solution and solid-state environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Convex training of Lipschitz-regularized shallow neural networks

arXiv:2606.19652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we introduce a training procedure for shallow neural networks that promotes robustness against adversarial attacks. We solve a non-convex Lipschitz-regularized training program by introducing a convex restriction that can be efficiently solved to global optimality. Our approach can be employed as a post-processing step by taking a pre-trained network as an initial solution to then solving the convex program whose optimal network is guaranteed to be no worse than the initial one. We illustrate the improvements of our training procedure with experiments using real world datasets for regression tasks under an adversarial setting. We show numerically that solving our proposed convex program yields networks with lower objective values on the Lipschitz-regularized program compared to existing methods. Additionally, we show that on certain datasets, networks obtained using our convex training program are both more accurate and robust with respect to adversarial attacks.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

DiffusionBlocks: Block-wise Neural Network Training via Diffusion Interpretation

arXiv:2506.14202v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability. Existing block-wise training methods offer means to alleviate this problem, but they rely on ad-hoc local objectives and remain largely unexplored beyond classification tasks. We propose $DiffusionBlocks$, a principled framework for transforming transformer-based networks into genuinely independent trainable blocks that maintain competitive performance with end-to-end training. Our key insight leverages the fact that residual connections naturally correspond to updates in a dynamical system. With minimal modifications to this system, we can convert the updates to those of a denoising process, where each block can be learned independently by leveraging the score matching objective. This independence enables training with gradients for only one block at a time, thereby reducing memory requirements in proportion to the number of blocks. Our experiments on a range of transformer architectures (vision, diffusion, autoregressive, recurrent-depth, and masked diffusion) demonstrate that DiffusionBlocks training matches the performance of end-to-end training while enabling scalable block-wise training on practical tasks beyond small-scale classification. DiffusionBlocks provides a theoretically grounded approach that successfully scales to modern generative tasks across diverse architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/DiffusionBlocks .

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

Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models

arXiv:2604.03208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models are a promising path to zero-shot embodied control through planning. However, existing world model planners struggle on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks: prediction errors compound and naive search is exponential in the planning horizon. Hierarchy mitigates both by decomposing tasks into shorter, tractable subproblems; yet prior hierarchical approaches either amortize control into task-specific policies (hierarchical RL) or assume low-dimensional states and known dynamics (classical hierarchical MPC). We present Hierarchical Planning with Latent World Models (HWM), an architecture and planning paradigm for hierarchical model predictive control (MPC) directly on visual world models trained solely via next-latent prediction. HWM learns world models at multiple temporal scales within a shared latent space, so predictions from the long-horizon model serve as subgoals for the short-horizon model via latent matching, without task-specific rewards, skill learning, or hierarchical policies. To keep long-horizon search tractable, HWM learns an action encoder that compresses primitive action chunks into latent macro-actions. On real-world Franka manipulation, HWM solves pick-and-place from a single goal image at 70% success vs. 0% for single-level planning. Across simulated push manipulation and maze navigation, HWM consistently improves performance on long-horizon tasks while requiring up to 3x less planning compute.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

High-Risk Anti-Seizure Medication Use in Childbearing-Age People with Epilepsy in a Taenia solium Endemic Region

Background: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy in regions endemic for Taenia solium, where neurocysticercosis (NCC) is highly prevalent, represent a vulnerable population due to the elevated burden of epilepsy and resource limitations. Clinical practice in these settings remains poorly characterized. This study characterized anti-seizure medication (ASM) prescribing patterns by medication risk profiles among people of childbearing potential with epilepsy in Northern Peru, a region highly endemic for T. solium. Methods: Participants were drawn from a prospective, population-based epilepsy cohort in Tumbes, Peru (2006 to 2020). The analytic population included females with epilepsy aged 15 to 49 years. The primary outcome was pregnancy-associated ASM risk of congenital malformations and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. ASMs were classified as ''Established Low Risk'' (lamotrigine, levetiracetam), ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' (carbamazepine, phenobarbital, phenytoin), and ''Established High Risk'' (valproic acid). Prescription patterns were examined in relation to demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Among 1,975 individuals with epilepsy, 685 were people of childbearing potential. Approximately 34.9% met criteria for probable or definite NCC. Most ASM prescriptions were in the ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' category (87.0%), and 12.8% received ''Established High Risk'' medications. In multivariable analysis, high-risk prescribing was associated with prior ASM use and polytherapy. Discussion: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy were predominantly treated with carbamazepine, phenytoin, phenobarbital, and valproate, reflecting local ASM availability. Despite evidence supporting lamotrigine and levetiracetam in pregnancy, prescribing patterns reflect local formulary constraints. These findings highlight a gap between guideline recommendations and real-world prescribing in resource-limited settings, underscoring the need for context-specific treatment strategies.

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

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Avidity of anti-pertussis toxin antibodies is associated with symptomatic Bordetella pertussis infection in a novel controlled human infection model

Background The association between functional antibody responses following Bordetella pertussis infection and symptomatic disease remains unclear. We characterized the maturation of anti-pertussis toxin (PT) IgG avidity after human challenge with B. pertussis and determined its association with symptomatic infection. Methods Healthy adults were intranasally inoculated with live B. pertussis organisms in a controlled human infection model and monitored for development of pertussis symptoms (NCT05136599). Serum samples were collected one day before inoculation and at 14, 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post challenge. Anti PT IgG avidity was tested using a titration of ammonium isothiocyanate (the bond breaking agent) to quantify a wide range of antibody avidities from low to very-high. Associations between covariates and avidity were examined using linear regression models, and high dimensional analyses were used to integrate all data. Findings Anti PT IgG avidity increased in both symptomatic (n=20) and asymptomatic (n=10) participants after the challenge, reached maximum levels at day 56, and then declined through day 365. Symptomatic participants developed significantly higher levels of high- and very high-avidity anti-PT antibodies at 28, 56, 180, and 365 days post-challenge compared with those who remained asymptomatic. In multivariate analyses, symptomatic infection was associated with higher levels of high and very high avidity anti-PT IgG at day180 and365 after challenge. Distinct avidity profiles in symptomatic vs asymptomatic participants emerged at day28 onwards, with the former group having higher levels of antibodies with higher avidities. However, levels of medium-high, high and very high avidity antibodies in symptomatic participants were lower at day 365 after challenge compared to their peak levels. Interpretation Anti-PT IgG avidity was associated with symptomatic B. pertussis infection and thus may serve as a surrogate of clinical disease outcome. These results highlight that antibody avidity provides an additional functional assay besides antibody quantitation to dissect immune responses to pertussis. Further investigation of anti PT IgG avidity should be pursued in natural pertussis outbreaks to determine whether it might be used to differentiate symptomatic from asymptomatic infections for epidemiologic purposes.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

This Guideline presents a systematic and operationalizable annotation framework for representing legal argumentation structures in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and provide a reliable foundation for computational analysis. At the element level, the Guideline distinguishes between the non-propositional layer and the propositional layer. The non-propositional layer consists of two elements: Issue and Non-argumentative Component. At the propositional level, the Guideline defines four proposition types: General Normative Judgment, Particular Normative Judgment, General Factual Judgment, and Particular Factual Judgment. At the relational level, five relation types are defined to represent argumentative structures: Support, Attack, Joint, Match, and Identity. These relations capture positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, correspondences between legal norms and case facts, and identity or semantic equivalence between propositions. The Guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent visualization of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this Guideline supports large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

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

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

Equivariant Representation Learning via Class-Pose Decomposition

arXiv:2207.03116v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a general method for learning representations that are equivariant to symmetries of data. Our central idea is to decompose the latent space into an invariant factor and the symmetry group itself. The components semantically correspond to intrinsic data classes and poses respectively. The learner is trained on a loss encouraging equivariance based on supervision from relative symmetry information. The approach is motivated by theoretical results from group theory and guarantees representations that are lossless, interpretable and disentangled. We provide an empirical investigation via experiments involving datasets with a variety of symmetries. Results show that our representations capture the geometry of data and outperform other equivariant representation learning frameworks.

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

AGDN: Learning to Solve Traveling Salesman Problem with Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network

arXiv:2606.19185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization and arises in many practical scenarios. Although graph-based learning approaches have been explored for TSP, the question of how to exploit graph structure more effectively remains open. We present the Anisotropic Graph Diffusion Network (AGDN), a new Graph Neural Network framework designed to solve TSP. Our method tackles two central difficulties: (1) the lack of informative topological prior in fully connected TSP graphs, and (2) losing connected nodes in the optimal solution after the commonly used graph sparsification techniques. To overcome these issues, we construct a MixScore transition matrix that merges node similarity with pairwise distance, and we develop an anisotropic graph diffusion strategy that supports efficient information exchange across multiple hops. Comprehensive experiments spanning diverse instance sizes and node distributions show that AGDN consistently outperforms existing methods while keeping computation time competitive. Furthermore, AGDN generalizes well to problem sizes and distributions beyond those seen during training. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/AGDN.

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

Online Realizable Regression and Applications for ReLU Networks

arXiv:2602.19172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Realizable online regression can behave very differently from online classification. Even without any margin or stochastic assumptions, realizability may enforce horizon-free (finite) cumulative loss under metric-like losses, even when the analogous classification problem has an infinite mistake bound. We study realizable online regression in the adversarial model under losses that satisfy an approximate triangle inequality (approximate pseudo-metrics). Recent work of Attias et al. shows that the minimax realizable cumulative loss is characterized by the scaled Littlestone/online dimension $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$, but this quantity can be difficult to analyze. Our main technical contribution is a generic potential method that upper bounds $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}$ by a concrete Dudley-type entropy integral that depends only on covering numbers of the hypothesis class under the induced sup pseudo-metric. We define an entropy potential $\Phi(\mathcal{H})=\int_{0}^{diam(\mathcal{H})} \log N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)\,d\varepsilon$, where $N(\mathcal{H},\varepsilon)$ is the $\varepsilon$-covering number of $\mathcal{H}$, and show that for every $c$-approximate pseudo-metric loss, $\mathbb{D}_{\mathrm{onl}}(\mathcal{H})\le O(c)\,\Phi(\mathcal{H})$. In particular, polynomial metric entropy implies $\Phi(\mathcal{H})d$, otherwise infinite), and for bounded-norm $k$-ReLU networks separate regression (finite loss, even $\widetilde O(k^2)$, and $O(1)$ for one ReLU) from classification (impossible already for $k=2,d=1$).

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

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

Discovering Symmetry Groups with Flow Matching

arXiv:2512.20043v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symmetry is fundamental to understanding physical systems and can improve performance and sample efficiency in machine learning. Both pursuits require knowledge of the underlying symmetries in data, yet discovering these symmetries automatically is challenging. We propose LieFlow, a novel framework that reframes symmetry discovery as a distribution learning problem on Lie groups. Instead of searching for the symmetry generators, our approach operates directly in group space, modeling a symmetry distribution over a large hypothesis group $G$. The support of the learned distribution reveals the underlying symmetry group $H \subseteq G$. Unlike previous works, LieFlow can discover both continuous and discrete symmetries within a unified framework, without assuming a fixed Lie algebra basis or a specific distribution over the group elements. Experiments on synthetic 2D and 3D point clouds, ModelNet10 and a real-world MI-Motion dataset show that LieFlow accurately discovers continuous and discrete subgroups, significantly outperforming a state-of-the-art baseline, LieGAN, in identifying discrete symmetries.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

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

Deep Sleep Classification via EEG Signal Criticality: A Passive BCI Approach for Sleep-Improvement Neurofeedback

arXiv:2606.13017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated sleep staging is a fundamental application of passive Brain-Computer Interfaces (pBCI), decoding spontaneous neural states to enable closed-loop interventions independent of user intent. This study evaluates criticality features derived from Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for the specific identification of deep sleep (N3). We analyzed $347,232$ EEG epochs from $290$ older women using UMAP manifold learning to visualize state transitions. Subsequently, six classifiers were benchmarked via 10-fold cross-validation, using balanced accuracy to determine the optimal "state-sensing" engine for neurofeedback.Naive Bayes achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy ($87.17\% \pm 0.24\%$), significantly outperforming a fully connected deep neural network (FNN: $81.58\%$) and Random Forest ($80.97\%$). Linear models (LDA: $57.21\%$; SVM: $51.01\%$) performed poorly, indicating that DFA-derived criticality features reside on a distinct, non-linear manifold. Probabilistic decoding of EEG criticality provides a high-accuracy sensing mechanism for pBCIs. This robust classification pipeline supports the development of state-dependent neurofeedback, such as targeted auditory stimulation, to enhance cognitive recovery.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Existence Precedes Value: Joint Modeling of Observational Existence and Evolving States in Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world time series are often highly incomplete and irregular due to sensor dormancy, transmission delays, and event-driven sampling, making reliable forecasting fundamentally challenging. Existing methods have evolved from impute-then-forecast pipelines to continuous-time models such as Neural ODEs and continuous-time graph networks. While these approaches improve the modeling of historical irregularity, they still rely on an implicit oracle assumption at inference time: the timestamps of future valid observations are presumed to be known in advance. This assumption limits practical relevance, since in many real systems the more fundamental question is not only what the future value will be, but also whether a valid observation will occur at all. In this paper, we propose Timeflies, a unified framework that reformulates forecasting as a joint problem of future observability inference and value estimation. To explicitly model the interaction between observation dynamics and state evolution, Timeflies adopts an observation stream and a value stream, coupled through three dedicated modules for reliability-aware embedding, observation-guided dependency modeling, and joint prediction. We further construct Shadow, a benchmark that combines natural missingness from public datasets with real-world industrial data, and introduce the Observation-Value Joint Entropy (OVJE) metric to comprehensively evaluate this coupled predictability. Extensive experiments show that Timeflies consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling future observability in time series forecasting with missing values. Code and dataset are available in https://github.com/ant-intl/Timeflies.

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

Revealing Hidden Vulnerabilities in Autoencoders through Gradient Signal Restoration

Adversarial robustness of deep autoencoders (AEs) has received less attention than that of discriminative models, although their compressed latent representations induce ill-conditioned mappings that can amplify small input perturbations and destabilize reconstructions. Existing white-box attacks for AEs, which optimize norm-bounded adversarial perturbations to maximize reconstruction damage, often converge to suboptimal perturbations, thereby potentially overstating AE robustness. We show that this limitation is linked to vanishing adversarial loss gradients during backpropagation through ill-conditioned layers, associated with near-zero singular values in their intermediate weight matrices. To address this, we propose GRILL (Gradient Signal Restoration in Ill-Conditioned Layers), a framework designed to mitigate gradient degradation and improve the reliability of adversarial robustness evaluation in encoder-decoder architectures. GRILL is designed to mitigate adversarial gradient degradation during optimization, enabling attacks to better approximate high-distortion perturbations under fixed norm constraints. Through extensive experiments across multiple AE architectures, under both sample-specific and universal attacks, as well as standard and adaptive attack settings, we show that GRILL significantly increases attack effectiveness, thereby exposing vulnerabilities hidden by existing attack limitations. Beyond AEs, we provide preliminary evidence that modern multimodal encoder-decoder architectures exhibit similar vulnerabilities.

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

GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs

True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models fail at this broader task. Collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, meaning it cannot be recovered by merely summing individual intentions. We present GroupToM-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal a gap between current models and human baselines, highlighting a failure to process social structures and non-linear collective dynamics.

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

Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing

Authors:

Drawing on 23 anonymized student pro-jects from a fourth-year Machine Transla-tion and Post-editing course in a BA-level translation programme, this paper exam-ines how structured comparison of gen-eral-purpose LLMs and online MT sys-tems can elicit evaluative judgement in AI-mediated translation. Students translat-ed short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequa-cy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their deci-sion in written reports. Descriptive counts are reported for all 23 projects, while qualitative interpretation is based on the 22 cases accompanied by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, naturalness, and expected post-editing ef-fort. The study therefore does not bench-mark systems under controlled conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an authentic classroom as-signment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dynamically Optimal Unraveling Schemes for Simulating Lindblad Equations

arXiv:2509.19887v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic unraveling schemes are powerful computational tools for simulating Lindblad equations, offering significant reductions in memory requirements. However, this advantage is accompanied by increased stochastic uncertainty, and the question of optimal unraveling remains open. In this work, we investigate unraveling schemes driven by Brownian motion or Poisson processes and present a comprehensive parametric characterization of these approaches. For the case of a single Lindblad operator and one noise term, this parametric family provides a complete description for unraveling scheme with pathwise norm-preservation. We further analytically derive dynamically optimal quantum state diffusion (DO-QSD) and dynamically optimal quantum jump process (DO-QJP) that minimize the growth rate of the variance of an observable locally in time. Compared to jump process ansatz, DO-QSD offers two notable advantages: firstly, the variance for DO-QSD can be rigorously shown not to exceed that of any jump-process ansatz locally in time; secondly, it has very simple expressions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DO-QSD scheme may achieve substantial reductions in the variance of observables and the resulting simulation error.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

arXiv:2603.04615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Uhlmann relative amplitude between two density matrices is shown to be a generating function, through which the quantum Fisher tensor that contains both the quantum Fisher information matrix and the mean Uhlmann curvature can be obtained via differentiation over system parameters. In the pure state limit, our generating function recovers that of the quantum geometric tensor proposed by Het\'{e}nyi and L\'{e}vay, and also clarifies the fidelity and phase between two quantum states as the generating functions of the quantum metric and Berry curvature, respectively. A generic expression for the quantum Fisher tensor in terms of the Bloch representation of density matrices is derived, which facilitates the calculation of the tensor, mean Uhlmann curvature, and geometric properties derived from the quantum Fisher information matrix. Canonical ensembles of spins are adopted to demonstrate our formalism, which reveals a constant Ricci scalar, a vacuum Einstein equation, and a cosmological constant on the 3D Euclidean manifold of the magnetic field.