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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

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

From Parameters to Feature Space: Task Arithmetic for Backdoor Mitigation in Model Merging

arXiv:2606.12498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging (MM) has gained significant attention as a cost-effective approach to integrate multiple task-specific models into a unified model. However, recent work reveals that MM is highly susceptible to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses based on task arithmetic often fail to eliminate backdoors without substantially degrading clean-task performance, owing to their reliance on direct parameter-space editing. To address this gap, we propose Linear Feature Path Minimization (LFPM), a backdoor mitigation framework for model merging, which introduces an anti-backdoor task vector into the backdoored merged model. Unlike prior approaches, LFPM formulates the backdoor robustness of the merged model from a unified feature-space perspective under the Cross-Task Linearity (CTL) framework, which leverages the approximate linearity of features across tasks. This perspective guides the optimization of the anti-backdoor task to suppress backdoors while preserving clean-task performance. Furthermore, we introduce an effective optimization mechanism based on gradient accumulation and loss path-integral, ensuring robust backdoor suppression along the interpolation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LFPM consistently exhibits strong robustness against backdoor attacks in both full fine-tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) settings.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

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

AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses

arXiv:2606.16167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI pluralism is often framed as a problem of representing diverse values, preferences, users, or outputs. This paper argues that this framing is incomplete because AI systems also impose ontologies: they define what counts as an entity, relation, feature, harm, benefit, and valid form of evidence. We define ontological flattening as the conversion of situated, contested, and historically specific meanings into a restricted technical category, proxy, aggregation rule, or benchmark target that is treated as neutral and difficult to contest. The paper develops a bounded conceptual and qualitative synthesis across value pluralism, pluralistic alignment, participatory and democratic AI, procedural justice, science and technology studies, accountability research, aggregate themes from 11 expert interviews, and three urban AI companion cases. The cases illustrate how pluralistic methods can improve or structure model behavior while still compressing categories, proxies, aggregation rules, and revision rights before affected actors have procedural standing. We introduce Pluralistic Lifecycle Governance (PLG) as a preliminary qualitative audit scaffold for documenting ontological openness, epistemic inclusion, procedural authority, evaluation pluralism, and lifecycle accountability. PLG is not presented as a validated scoring instrument; it is a framework for making the evidence and governance conditions of pluralistic AI explicit.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Link Fragility in Asymmetric W-Class States under Quantum Noise

arXiv:2606.12307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The asymmetric three-qubit W-class state $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ defines an isosceles entanglement-network geometry, (a) two vertex-base (VB) links form stronger bipartite connections, (b) while the base-base (BB) link is weaker. This suggests that concentrating entanglement into a super-link may be advantageous for quantum-network tasks. Here, we show that this intuition is incomplete. We analytically compare the bipartite concurrence dynamics of the symmetric |W> state and the asymmetric $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ state, which differ both in entanglement-network geometry and excitation sector under standard noise models. In the absence of noise, the concurrence hierarchy is C_{VB} > C_W > C_{BB}$. Under phase damping, this hierarchy is preserved for all noise strengths and no entanglement sudden death occurs. Under amplitude damping, however, the hierarchy is reordered. The symmetric |W> state becomes the most robust, while the base-base concurrence of $|\overline{W_3^L}\rangle$ vanishes at the finite threshold of parameter $\gamma$. We term this reordering as the Super-Link Fragility Effect. The same structural asymmetry that produces a stronger vertex-base link also makes it more vulnerable to energy dissipation when coupled with multi-excitation amplitudes. Under depolarization, the asymmetry advantage is erased, with $C_W$ and $C_{VB}$ sharing the same sudden-death threshold for some value of the parameter p, while $C_{BB}$ disappears earlier at some other value of the parameter p. The generalized amplitude damping channel continuously connects the damping-dominated regime to the pure-excitation limit, where the initial hierarchy is restored. These results show that entanglement robustness in $W$-class resources is controlled not by initial concurrence alone, but by the joint structure of entanglement-network geometry, excitation sector, and noise symmetry.

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

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DDI_single: Single-Sequence-Based Protein Domain Assembly

Authors:

Domains are the basic units of protein structure and function. Appropriate inter-domain organization is critical to enable cooperative execution of multiple related functions. It is thus a crucial step to determine the full-length structure of multi-domain proteins for the purpose of elucidating their functions and designing new drugs to regulate these functions. Existing structure prediction algorithms are generally better at solving the internal conformation of domains, rather than modeling the relative positions between domains. To address the challenge of accurately determining multi-domain protein conformations, we develop a single-sequence-based domain assembly algorithm called DDI_single. DDI_single directly extracts features from the amino acid sequence using the protein language model ESM-1b, and accurately predicts the interactions between residue pairs of structural domains through a novel gated cross-attention module, thus achieving the correct assembly of structural domains. With the knowledge of domain definition, DDI_single achieves more than 20% higher accuracy in the task of predicting the relative distances of residue pairs between domains than that of the single-sequence-based structure prediction algorithm trRosettaX_single. When assembling domains with known spatial conformations, DDI_single correctly assembles 74.4% of the samples in the test set (TM-score>0.5). When assembling domains with unknown spatial conformations, in cases where the internal spatial conformations of domains are correctly modeled, DDI_single correctly assembles 73.9% of the samples.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

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

NeuroClaw Technical Report

Agentic artificial intelligence systems promise to accelerate scientific workflows, but neuroimaging poses unique challenges: heterogeneous modalities (sMRI, fMRI, dMRI, EEG), long multi-stage pipelines, and persistent reproducibility risks. To address this gap, we present NeuroClaw, a domain-specialized multi-agent research assistant for executable and reproducible neuroimaging research. NeuroClaw operates directly on raw neuroimaging data across formats and modalities, grounding decisions in dataset semantics and BIDS metadata so users need not prepare curated inputs or bespoke model code. The platform combines harness engineering with end-to-end environment management, including pinned Python environments, Docker support, automated installers for common neuroimaging tools, and GPU configuration. In practice, this layer emphasizes checkpointing, post-execution verification, structured audit traces, and controlled runtime setup, making toolchains more transparent while improving reproducibility and auditability. A three-tier skill/agent hierarchy separates user-facing interaction, high-level orchestration, and low-level tool skills to decompose complex workflows into safe, reusable units. Alongside the NeuroClaw framework, we introduce NeuroBench, a system-level benchmark for executability, artifact validity, and reproducibility readiness. Across multiple multimodal LLMs, NeuroClaw-enabled runs yield consistent and substantial score improvements compared with direct agent invocation. Project homepage: https://cuhk-aim-group.github.io/NeuroClaw/index.html

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

QK-Normed MLA: QK normalization without full key caching

Query-key (QK) normalization stabilizes attention by controlling the scale of queries and keys before the dot product, but is not immediately compatible with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). MLA achieves efficient decoding by caching low-dimensional latent states instead of full keys, whereas post-projection QK RMSNorm appears to require the fully projected key for every cached token. We show this apparent incompatibility is an implementation artifact, not an architectural constraint. RMSNorm decomposes into a static affine weight and a dynamic scalar RMS statistic. The static key-side weight can be absorbed into the MLA query-side projection; the dynamic key statistic reduces to one inverse-RMS scalar per token and KV group. The resulting formulation is exactly equivalent to explicit post-projection QK RMSNorm in exact arithmetic and preserves MLA's latent decode path. In our 400M runs trained for up to 100B tokens, QK-Normed MLA achieves lower training loss and better downstream accuracy than QK clipping, while H800 decode benchmarks show less than 2% latency overhead up to 256k context. These results make QK normalization a practical stabilization option for MLA models without requiring full-key caching.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clinical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language models for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, enabling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clinically equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we obtain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain-specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasserstein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

arXiv:2606.19376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.

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

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

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

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Towards a Unified Generative Model for Scarce Time Series with Domain Experts

arXiv:2606.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthesizing realistic time series with generative models has wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios. Despite recent progress, most existing methods are trained under the assumption of abundant training data, which substantially limits their effectiveness in data-scarce settings. In this paper, we propose TimeMoDE, a novel framework that integrates Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts to exploit both domain adaptability and diffusion-stage awareness for time series generation under data scarcity. It is pre-trained on a large-scale collection of multi-domain datasets to extract domain-agnostic temporal representations and domain-specific information benefiting generalization during fine-tuning. We propose Domain Prompts to condition expert assignment for indistinguishable noised tokens, mitigating the limitations of capturing inter-dataset relationships. Moreover, we incorporate diffusion timestep signals to equip the experts with awareness of time series degradation variations, facilitating adaptive calibrate to stage-dependent denoising requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeMoDE outperforms existing methods under diverse low-data settings. It establishes an innovative paradigm for advanced time series few-shot generation.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

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

Whole-Brain Connectomic Graph Model Enables Whole-Body Locomotion Control in Fruit Fly

arXiv:2602.17997v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Animals perform coordinated whole-body movements under the control of neural systems shaped by brain-wide connectivity. The mapping of the whole-brain neural connections, or the connectomes, provides a natural graph for modeling sensorimotor information flow, yet its potential as a neural controller for embodied agents remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the Fly-connectomic Graph Model, which directly instantiates the whole-brain connectome of an adult Drosophila as a graph-structured neural controller for movements of a simulated biomechanical fruit fly via deep reinforcement learning. We achieve stable performance across diverse locomotion tasks, as well as better sample efficiency compared to both graph and non-graph baselines. Our results demonstrate a biologically informed way towards effective control policy design by translating whole-brain wiring principles into actionable architectural priors, while also improving the interpretability through dynamic information flow. This work also highlights the potential to bridge neuromechanics with embodied intelligence by providing a computational platform for investigating the sensorimotor transformation underlying animal behavior and a paradigm to advance the development of more nature-aligned intelligent systems.

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

Diffusion-Proof: Recipe for Formal Theorem Proving Beyond Auto-Regressive Generation

arXiv:2606.19315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enhancing the formal math reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a key focus in both mathematical and computer science communities in recent years. While significant progress has been made in using state-of-the-art Auto-Regressive (AR) LLMs for formal theorem proving, these models suffer from inherent limitations. Their next-token prediction generation methods may yield suboptimal performance due to the challenges of long-range coherence and the compounding of errors over long sequences. Recent advancements in diffusion LLMs (dLLMs), which generate text through iterative denoising of a multi-token block, offer a promising alternative. However, the application of dLLMs to formal mathematics, where maintaining long-range coherence is critical, remains largely understudied. To address the challenges above, we propose **Diffusion-Proof**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to train and apply dLLMs for formal theorem proving. Our frameworks contain training and inference methods for two models. The first one is *dLLM-Prover-7B*, which performs whole-proof writing with long-range coherent tactic usage. The second one is *dLLM-Corrector-7B*, which is a novel large block diffusion-based correction model. It leverages the in-filling capabilities of dLLMs to perform local proof correction using bi-directional information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Diffusion-Proof** relatively significantly outperforms the AR LLM baseline trained under the same dataset. **Diffusion-Proof** achieves an absolute improvement of **1.61%** on ProofNet-Test and **6.14%** on MiniF2F-Test benchmarks compare to the baseline. Notably, **Diffusion-Proof** successfully resolves one IMO problem that more advanced thinking model DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B could not solve, showcasing the unique advantage of dLLMs in formal theorem proving.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

BioDivergence: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Hidden Contextual Contradictions in Biomedical Abstracts

Biomedical findings often seem to conflict across studies, but many of these differences are context-dependent rather than true contradictions. Variations in cohort, geography, assay protocol, disease subtype, and clinical setting can make both claims locally valid. Existing NLI and scientific claim-verification benchmarks reduce such cases to entailment, contradiction, or neutral, failing to capture the contextual structure behind divergence. To address this, we introduce BioDivergence, an evaluation framework with a six-class conflict taxonomy, a 13-axis divergence ontology, and four structured outputs per claim pair: conflict type, divergence axes, dominant confounder, and reconciliation explanation. We release BioDivergence-Silver-v1.0, an article-disjoint silver benchmark of 11,865 claim pairs across five biomedical domains, alongside a legacy deduplicated variant for comparison. Results show notable ranking differences between the two variants, with the fine-tuned reference model dropping about 12 points under the article-disjoint setting, while Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 achieves 0.5523 accuracy and 0.3894 contextual-F1 on the 842-example primary test set. BioDivergence offers a more faithful way to distinguish contextual divergence from direct contradiction and to separate article-level memorization from genuine task learning.

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

Quantum Stochastic Inflation

arXiv:2606.12636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate stochastic inflation in an open quantum system framework. The field coarse-grained in a patch of fixed physical size, and the total momentum of that patch, form a canonical pair and act on a one-mode Fock space which we identify as the "bulk". At each time step, new comoving modes join the coarse-grained patch and the bulk has to be redefined. This redefinition produces an entangled mode that is traced over, yielding a non-unitary evolution equation for the bulk's density matrix. For a free test field in de Sitter, one obtains GKLS dynamics, generated by an effective Hamiltonian and a single non-Hermitian Lindblad operator, hence diffusion and Hubble friction originate from the same quantum channel. The Wigner-Weyl transform of the GKLS equation leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner function, which matches the one that applies to the classical phase-space distribution of stochastic inflation. We also provide several schemes under which one can unravel the GKLS dynamics into stochastic Schrodinger equations when continuous measurements of the decoupled mode are performed, making contact with Langevin formulations of stochastic inflation. In the light-field regime, an additional overdamped reduction can be performed by integrating out the momentum variable in the Wigner distribution, leading to Starobinsky's slow-roll Fokker-Planck equation. In that regime, the purity of the patch is strongly suppressed. In contrast, for heavy fields, field diffusion is suppressed and the coarse-grained patch remains close to a pure underdamped oscillator, which prevents a classical stochastic treatment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MIRAGE: Runtime Scheduling for Multi-Vector Image Retrieval with Hierarchical Decomposition

To effectively leverage user-specific data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is employed in multimodal large language model (MLLM) applications. However, conventional retrieval approaches often suffer from limited retrieval accuracy. Recent advances in multi-vector retrieval (MVR) improve accuracy by decomposing queries and matching against segmented images. They still suffer from sub-optimal accuracy and efficiency, overlooking alignment between the query and varying image objects and redundant fine-grained image segments. In this work, we present an efficient scheduling framework for image retrieval - MIRAGE. First, we introduce a novel hierarchical paradigm, employing multiple intermediate granularities for varying image objects to enhance alignment. Second, we minimize redundancy in retrieval by leveraging cross-hierarchy similarity consistency and hierarchy sparsity to minimize unnecessary matching computation. Furthermore, we configure parameters for each dataset automatically for practicality across diverse scenarios. Our empirical study shows that, MIRAGE not only achieves substantial accuracy improvements but also reduces computation by up to 3.5 times over the existing MVR system.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Extrema of microscopically slowed-down Gaussian fields

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a family of Gaussian fields whose covariance structure exhibits an inhomogeneous, microscopic slowdown and it interpolates between a $\log$ profile (for a certain interpolation parameter $\alpha=0$) and a $\log\log$ profile (when the interpolation parameter is $\alpha=1/2$). We consider both one dimensional such objects (which we call {\it Branching Brownian Motions in a cooling environment}) as well as higher dimensional, spatial fields. We identify the correct centering of the maximum at time $T$ and prove tightness of the recentered maximum. While the exponent in the first-order growth varies linearly with $\alpha$, giving a leading order of $T^{1-\alpha}$, the second-order correction exhibits a phase transition at $\alpha=1/3$.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner