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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

WiFi-Based People Counting Using Beam-Steerable Antennas: A Test-bed Study

Authors:
Riccardo Bersan↗Anay Ajit Deshpande↗Sanaz Kianoush↗Daniele Piazza↗Stefano Savazzi↗

arXiv:2606.23710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ubiquitous perception through RF signals is a pivotal opportunity for future technology: it enables personalized services such as smart living, remote healthcare, automated logistics or interaction through free-space gestures. The ubiquity of Wi-Fi and cellular networks presents a promising platform for the development of innovative sensing tools. Future standards will also introduce dedicated sensing features which, for example, will allow routers to work as frequency modulated continuous wave radios targeting radar applications. Most of the current chip designs support ad-hoc firmware for CSI extraction with MIMO arrangements of the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) antennas and OFDM subcarriers. The CSI describes the phase shift and amplitude attenuation of multiple propagation paths on each subcarrier. The latest IEEE 802.11be standard (Wi-Fi 7) offers a wider subcarrier bandwidth of 160MHz (up to 320MHz), providing at least 120 usable pilot subcarriers for CSI or CIR estimation. Additionally, Wi-Fi signals have been recently exploited to track daily human movements and behaviors, while Wi-Fi signal variations have been shown to differ between different people and can consequently be used for their re-identification.

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

Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models

Authors:
Tsung-En Lin↗Hung-Yi Lee↗

arXiv:2606.11400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal position of maximal steering-induced attention change recovers the location of a queried sound event without any training, attaining 60.87% and 68.72% overlap with ground-truth intervals on Qwen2-Audio and Audio Flamingo 3, far above direct prompting (31.84%, 46.75%) and random baselines (27.74%). Our results characterize a mechanistic property of instruction-based steering in LALMs and provide a training-free probe for the latent temporal structure these models encode.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Authors:
Muhamudu↗Niwagaba↗Rwakahangi↗S. P↗Kwagala↗Miller↗T. R↗Zyambo↗Rizzo↗Achoki↗

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

Authors:
Kian Hwee Lim↗Kiarn T. Laverick↗Sahil Sardar Jafar↗Samyak P. Prasad↗Maria Maffei↗Alexia Auff\`eves↗

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

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05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

Authors:
Joshua J. Y. Chan↗Nicolas Privault↗

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

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

Optimal Scheduling in a Question-Answering Forum of Knowledge Workers

Authors:
Rohit Negi↗Mustafa Yilmaz↗

arXiv:2606.19759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As individuals turn to the Internet to find answers to questions they may have, several Question Answering (QA) forums have evolved, where users knowledgeable in certain topics can contribute their expertise to answering these requests for information. While these are currently volunteer based, we consider a future version employing knowledge workers who are experts in certain topics. In such a system, the request-answer processes forming the queuing system may utilize schedulers that assign requests in different topics to the experts in the forum, who may be able to answer them according to their expertise levels in different topics. With this model, we calculate the capacity of the system for handling the requests while keeping the system stable, and design schedulers that achieve capacity. We also investigate how collaboration between experts in answering requests can potentially increase capacity.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CPAM: Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation for Zero-Shot Real Image Editing

Authors:
Dinh-Khoi Vo↗Thanh-Toan Do↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Editing natural images using textual descriptions in text-to-image diffusion models remains a significant challenge, particularly in achieving consistent generation and handling complex, non-rigid objects. Existing methods often struggle to preserve textures and identity, require extensive fine-tuning, and exhibit limitations in editing specific spatial regions or objects while retaining background details. This paper proposes Context-Preserving Adaptive Manipulation (CPAM), a novel zero-shot framework for complicated, non-rigid real image editing. Specifically, we propose a preservation adaptation module that adjusts self-attention mechanisms to preserve and independently control the object and background effectively. This ensures that the objects' shapes, textures, and identities are maintained while keeping the background undistorted during the editing process using the mask guidance technique. Additionally, we develop a localized extraction module to mitigate the interference with the non-desired modified regions during conditioning in cross-attention mechanisms. We also introduce various mask-guidance strategies to facilitate diverse image manipulation tasks in a simple manner. CPAM can be seamlessly integrated with multiple diffusion backbones, including SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL, demonstrating strong generalization across different model architectures. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed Image Manipulation BenchmArk (IMBA), a robust benchmark dataset specifically designed for real image editing, demonstrate that our proposed method is the preferred choice among human raters, outperforming existing state-of-the-art editing techniques. The source code and data will be publicly released at the project page: https://vdkhoi20.github.io/CPAM

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

History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

Authors:
Hans van Ditmarsch↗

arXiv:2606.13703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. We trace the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The puzzle inspired a numerous variations such as involving numbers or coloured hats. We also present a novel hats puzzle involving self-reference.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Improving Detection of Rare Nodes in Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning

Authors:
Isaac Xu↗Martin Gillis↗Ayushi Sharma↗Benjamin Misiuk↗Craig J. Brown↗Thomas Trappenberg↗

arXiv:2602.08986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In hierarchical multi-label classification, a persistent challenge is enabling model predictions to reach deeper levels of the hierarchy for more detailed or fine-grained classifications. This difficulty partly arises from the natural rarity of certain classes (or hierarchical nodes) and the hierarchical constraint that ensures child nodes are almost always less frequent than their parents. To address this, we propose a weighted loss objective for neural networks that combines node-wise imbalance weighting with focal weighting components, the latter leveraging modern quantification of ensemble uncertainties. By emphasizing rare nodes rather than rare observations (data points), and focusing on uncertain nodes for each model output distribution during training, we observe improvements in recall by up to a factor of five on benchmark datasets, along with statistically significant gains in $F_{1}$ score. We also show our approach aids convolutional networks on challenging tasks, as in situations with suboptimal encoders or limited data.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

3D Ising criticality with Platonic lattice superconducting qubits

Authors:
Liyang Sui↗Hong-Hao Song↗Sainan Huai↗Yufan Li↗Zhiwen Zong↗Kunliang Bu↗Xiaopei Yang↗Xingrui Liu↗Wenyan Jin↗Bowen Chen↗Xutao Zhang↗Jianlan Wu↗…

arXiv:2606.16854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The three-dimensional (3D) Ising model is a foundational model in statistical physics and critical phenomena, yet its analytical intractability has long impeded the precise determination of universal critical exponents. While high-precision estimates have been obtained through classical numerical methods and conformal bootstrap techniques, a direct quantum simulation of the 3D Ising criticality remains challenging, requiring nontrivial connectivity, sufficient system size, and high spectral resolution. In this work, assisted by the state-operator correspondence of conformal field theory, we perform a digital quantum simulation of the 3D Ising critical exponents using a multiply-connected 9-qubit superconducting quantum processor with a Platonic lattice geometry. Employing an extended variational quantum eigensolver equipped with a phase-based loss function, we variationally prepare the low-energy eigenstates of the transverse-field Ising model on a cubic Platonic lattice encoded in an 8-qubit register. The four lowest eigenenergies are extracted via Fourier-transform analysis and high-precision numerical fitting, agreeing with the exact diagonalization values up to +/- 0.001. The resulting scaling dimension Delta_epsilon = 1.5850 and critical exponent nu = 0.7067 match well with theory.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Perron–Frobenius theorem for a general tree-valued growth-fragmentation-isolation process

Authors:
Chenlin Gu↗Mingyuan Shen↗Ronghang Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.24599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A general tree-valued dynamics is considered in continuous time: new vertices are added, and the percolation happens on the links, and the connected components can be frozen. The model is an infinite-type branching process. The main result establishes the Perron–Frobenius type theorem on this model, which extends the previous work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 33 (6B) 5233 - 5278]. The proof does not rely on any property of the uniform random recursive tree.

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

Riemannian Metric Matching for Scalable Geometric Modeling of Distributions

Authors:
Jacob Bamberger↗Adam Gosztolai↗Pierre Vandergheynst↗Michael Bronstein↗Iolo Jones↗

arXiv:2606.14334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional datasets often concentrate near low-dimensional structures, but estimating their geometry from samples typically relies on graphs and kernels that scale poorly with dataset size and dimension. We propose Riemannian metric matching: a denoising probabilistic framework for learning the Riemannian geometry of data using neural networks. Specifically, we learn the carré du champ operator, which, using diffusion geometry, gives us access to the Riemannian geometry toolkit for downstream machine learning and statistical tasks. Our key observation is that the carré du champ operator can be formulated as a conditional expectation over random perturbations of the data, which can be exploited for sample-wise training and constant cost, amortized inference without explicit kernel construction. Empirically, metric matching rivals or improves the accuracy of $k$-NN-based diffusion geometry estimators, while enabling amortized inference that is up to $400\times$ faster, and supports graph-free geometric analysis on high-dimensional images where nearest neighbors break down.

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

SiGnature: Explicit Motion Diffusion for Stylized Semantic Gesture

Authors:
Adi Rosenthal↗Tomer Koren↗Nadav Shaked↗Doron Friedman↗Ariel Shamir↗

While recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have achieved impressive rhythmic synchronization, synthesizing gestures that are both semantically meaningful and faithful to a speaker's unique non-verbal style remains an open challenge. Semantic gestures, such as iconic shapes or deictic pointing, are statistically sparse, making them difficult to learn effectively within standard generative models. We present SiGnature, a framework for Stylized and Semantic Gesture generation that reconciles precise semantic control with high-fidelity style preservation. Unlike prevalent methods that rely on entangled latent representations, SiGnature operates in an explicit joint-rotation space. This design enables our core contribution, Joint Motion Integration (JMI), a training-free inference mechanism capable of injecting any external motion sequence, particularly in-the-wild semantic gestures, directly into the diffusion process. JMI automatically identifies the specific ``active joints'' conveying a semantic action and injects them into the generation, while relying on the diffusion backbone to synthesize the remaining body dynamics, including posture and flow, in accordance with the pre-learned style of the target speaker. This allows for the plug-and-play integration of arbitrary motions, including complex semantic gestures, without retraining or introducing the ``Frankenstein'' artifacts typical of cut-and-paste methods. Extensive experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that SiGnature offers superior semantic motion control while maintaining smooth and natural co-speech gesture generation and preserving the distinct characteristics of the speaker, thereby outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

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15.
Science (Express) 2026-06-02

Another red alert for American science | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the president’s draconian cuts to research funding last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under Russell Vought, has found new ways to circumvent the will of Congress and starve American science. At the beginning of this year, OMB dragged its feet in releasing instructions to federal agencies for how to distribute the funding appropriated by Congress, leading to lags in dispersal. Now, OMB has proposed revising the rules that govern how federal dollars are spent. The changes would inevitably lead to unlegislated reductions in funding and damage US leadership in science, both in academia and industry.

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

DTVEM-RE: A Hierarchical Random-Effects Extension of the Differential Time-Varying Effect Model for Person-Specific Multi-Lag Estimation in Intensive Longitudinal Data

Authors:
Amartya Bhattacharya↗

arXiv:2606.14116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Differential Time-Varying Effect Model (DTVEM) of Jacobson et al. (2019) is a popular tool for finding the best time lag in intensive longitudinal data, but it assumes everyone shares the same lag structure. The original authors named fixing this as future work, and it clashes with the premise of modern clinical research, which is that people differ. We present DTVEM-RE, an extension that lets each person have their own lag coefficients, with two versions of the confirmatory step: a discrete-time hierarchical Bayesian VAR in Stan, which pools across people and gives calibrated uncertainty, and a continuous-time per-person Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model in ctsem, which handles unevenly spaced beeps directly. We report four results. A simulation shows the Bayesian version recovers the between-person spread tau_a with bias below 0.01 and coverage of 90 to 93 percent. On the Fisher et al. (2017) EMA dataset (N=40), person-specific lag-1 effects vary by an order of magnitude across three mood items, the Bayesian and GAMM estimates agree closely (r=0.87 to 0.92), and DTVEM-RE gives the best one-step-ahead prediction among four discrete-time methods. A multi-lag version shows all nine tau_k values have credible intervals excluding zero, and the lag where people differ most changes across items, something lag-1-only methods like mlVAR cannot detect. Finally, the two versions agree almost exactly on person-specific lag-1 estimates (r >= 0.995), differing only as shrinkage predicts. DTVEM-RE is, to our knowledge, the first person-specific implementation of DTVEM-style lag detection, and it contains standard DTVEM as a special case.

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

An Introduction to Causal Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Elias Bareinboim↗Junzhe Zhang↗Sanghack Lee↗

arXiv:2606.24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.e., what would have happened had reality been different, even when no data of this unrealized reality is currently available. Reinforcement learning provides methods to learn a policy that optimizes a specific measure (e.g., reward, regret) when the agent is deployed in an environment and pursues an exploratory, trial-and-error approach. These two disciplines have evolved independently and with virtually no interaction between them. We note that they operate over different aspects of the same building block, counterfactual relations, which makes them umbilically connected. Based on these observations, novel learning opportunities arise when this connection is explicitly acknowledged and mathematized. To realize this potential, we note that any environment where the RL agent is deployed can be decomposed as a collection of autonomous mechanisms with different causal invariances, parsimoniously modeled as a structural causal model; any standard RL setting implicitly encodes such a model. This formalization allows us to put under a unifying treatment different modes of learning, including online, off-policy, and causal calculus learning, which appear unrelated in the literature. However, these modalities are not exhaustive: we introduce several natural and pervasive classes of learning settings that entail novel dimensions of analysis. Specifically, we introduce and discuss through causal lenses generalized policy learning, where to intervene, imitation learning, and counterfactual learning. These tasks lead to a broader view of counterfactual learning and suggest great potential for studying causal inference and reinforcement learning side by side, which we call causal reinforcement learning (CRL).

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

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

Authors:
Frank Zhengqing Wu↗Francesco Tonin↗Volkan Cevher↗

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

Authors:
Chenrui Wu↗Zexi Li↗Jiajun Bu↗Jiangchuan Liu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lifted Schrödinger Bridges for Gaussian Mixture Endpoints: Projection Gaps and Path-Space Obstructions

Authors:
Siddhartha Ganguly↗George Rapakoulias↗Panagiotis Tsiotras↗

arXiv:2605.24795v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study stochastic density control between Gaussian-mixture endpoint distributions under Brownian prior dynamics. Since the direct Schrödinger bridge between Gaussian mixtures is generally not available in closed form, we introduce a lifted path-space construction in which each trajectory is augmented with a source–target component label. Consequently, the problem decomposes into Gaussian component-to-component Schrödinger bridges with explicit marginal, drift, and cost formulas, while the mixture-level assignment reduces to a finite-dimensional entropic coupling problem with a Sinkhorn scaling form. We then analyze the projection obtained by discarding or forgetting the label. By construction, the projected law satisfies the original Gaussian-mixture endpoint constraints, but its relative entropy generally differs from the lifted relative entropy by a nonnegative conditional label-information gap. This gap reveals a path-space obstruction: the lifted optimizer cannot, in general, be identified with the direct unlabeled Schrödinger bridge after projection. We also derive the posterior-averaged Markov drift associated with the projected marginal flow, prove a kinetic-energy upper bound, and identify a common path-potential condition under which the projection gap vanishes. Several numerical illustrations showing density and shape control are recorded for a self-contained exposition.

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

Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization

Authors:
Junyi Li↗Xiaowei Qian↗Yingyi Zhang↗Wenlin Zhang↗Guojing Li↗Sheng Zhang↗Xiao Han↗Yichao Wang↗Xiangyu Zhao↗

Recent advances in tool-integrated language agents have significantly improved their ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, existing alignment methods predominantly focus on maximizing task accuracy, while overlooking auxiliary objectives such as tool-use efficiency, which are essential for practical deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ParetoPO, a two-stage multi-objective optimization framework for aligning tool-using large language models (LLMs) under competing objectives. In the first stage, ParetoPO leverages hypervolume-guided dynamic scalarization to adapt reward weights based on global Pareto frontier progress. In the second stage, it replaces scalarized learning signals with Pareto-ranking-based advantage computation, promoting nondominated trajectories through dominance-aware credit assignment. This design enables fine-grained, action-level optimization across multiple conflicting objectives. Experimental results on mathematic reasoning and multi-hop QA tasks show that ParetoPO consistently discovers policies with superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs compared to static and heuristic baselines.

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

Schrödinger Symmetry in Spherically-symmetric Static Mini-superspaces with Matter Fields

Authors:
Taishi Sano↗Yuki Yokokura↗

arXiv:2512.13651v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Schr\"{o}dinger symmetry has been shown to emerge in a ``fluid limit" from the full superspace to several mini-superspace models. To investigate one aspect of the robustness of this emergent symmetry, we consider two spherically-symmetric static mini-superspace models with matter fields at the classical level: (i) a Maxwell field with a cosmological constant and (ii) $n$ massless scalar fields. By developing a method based on canonical transformations, we demonstrate that for model (i), 3D Schrödinger symmetry emerges, and the solution is the (anti-)de Sitter Reissner-Nordström spacetime, and for model (ii), $(2+n)$D Schrödinger symmetry appears, and the solution is a generalized Janis-Newman-Winicour spacetime and its ``interior", a Kantowski-Sachs type closed universe. Furthermore, for the vacuum model, we find that 2D Schrödinger symmetry holds with different lapse functions and mini-superspace coordinates, suggesting the potential, yet unconfirmed, covariance of the symmetry. Finally, we propose a physical interpretation of the symmetry under the Hamiltonian constraint $H$: symmetry generators commuting with $H$ map a solution to another one, while those non-commuting with $H$ generate a new theory with the Schrödinger symmetry and the transformed configuration is a solution to the new theory. These results reinforce the robustness of the emergent Schrödinger symmetry and open new frontiers for exploring dynamics of matter and gravity.

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

Topological Quantum Interferometry

Authors:
Tianyou Ying↗Yufeng Zhou↗Chengwei Pan↗Ryan Hogan↗Ruoyang Zhang↗Hui Liu↗Shining Zhu↗Xiaoqin Gao↗

arXiv:2606.19730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured light provides high-dimensional Hilbert spaces holding tremendous potential for fundamental quantum optics and quantum technologies. However, existing characterization methods, like Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, typically assume perfectly tuned conditions, overlooking the geometric physics governing spatial mode evolution. Here, we establish topological quantum interferometry driven by an interaction-based geometric phase, the exchange Berry phase (BPX). Our formalism generalizes $q$-plate state generation and characterization to arbitrary topological charges and (de)tuning conditions, demonstrating that BPX acts as a geometric marker governing spatial interference. We show BPX serves as a deterministic control parameter, decomposing two-photon spatial patterns into geometry-dictated fundamental modes. This mapping reveals topological invariants and phase singularities that function as a non-tomographic witness for state dimensionality estimation, circumventing full-state reconstruction. Being device-independent and highly scalable, this approach enables scalable high-dimensional characterization and topologically protected state selection, with direct applicability to quantum metrology and high-capacity quantum networks.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MUNI: Multimodal Unified Latent Diffusion for Coherent Any-to-Any Generation

Authors:
Kyeongmin Yeo↗Yunhong Min↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.16408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MUNI, an end-to-end multimodal latent diffusion framework for any-to-any generation that unifies subset-conditioned cross-modal generation and unconditional joint sampling through a shared stochastic latent. Existing multimodal generative models are largely LLM-based, which limits leveraging modality-specific generators and requires text-paired data for training. Recent diffusion- and flow-based any-to-any extensions take a different direction but still rely on text-aligned embeddings, fully-paired training, or matched-dimensionality deterministic mappings. MUNI rests on two complementary contributions, one architectural and one in the training objective. First, we extend latent diffusion to multimodal any-to-any generation end-to-end: instead of the standard two-stage recipe that precomputes a frozen latent space and then fits a prior over it, MUNI jointly trains modality-specific encoders, expressive decoders, and a single shared flow-based prior under one objective. Second, we identify that the standard aggregation rules of multimodal variational inference are insufficient once coupled with a learned prior and expressive decoders. A suitable shared latent must simultaneously satisfy coherence across generated modalities, predictive sufficiency of subset latents, and minimality of the latent content. We propose a routed training objective whose structural choices align the latent with these criteria and admit a minimal-sufficiency characterization in the realizable setting. Experiments on PolyMNIST-Quadrant-Labels and a large-scale image-text-audio benchmark show MUNI matching or exceeding the strongest baselines on conditional generation while opening its largest margins on unconditional coherence. Project page: https://muni-proj.github.io/.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Multi-Grade Deep Learning for Partial Differential Equations with Applications to the Burgers Equation

Authors:
Yuesheng Xu↗Taishan Zeng↗

arXiv:2309.07401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) show great promise for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but their deep architectures introduce complex, large-scale, non-convex optimization challenges. Nonlinear PDEs, like the viscous Burgers' equation, compound these difficulties due to steep gradients and shock-like solutions. To address this, we propose a two-stage multi-grade deep learning (TS-MGDL) method. In the first stage, shallow networks are trained progressively grade by grade to fit the target function from low- to high-frequency components; previously learned grades are frozen, and each new residual block is trained solely to minimize the remaining approximation error. The second stage unfreezes and retrains selected layers using the first-stage network as initialization, achieving an interpretable, stable hierarchical refinement while mitigating optimization complexity. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that each grade and stage in TS-MGDL monotonically reduces the loss function under an appropriate optimization strategy. Numerical experiments on 1D, 2D, and 3D viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that TS-MGDL significantly outperforms single-grade learning (SGL), reducing predictive errors by up to a factor of 60.

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