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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

FBOS-RL: Feedback-Driven Bi-Objective Synergistic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.20256v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for aligning and unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large-scale models. At its core, the training loop of GRPO and its variants alternates between rollout sampling and policy update: the policy first samples rollouts from its action space, and then updates its parameters according to the advantages computed over them. Unlike supervised learning, where each gradient step is anchored to an explicit ground-truth target, the optimal gradient direction for updating model parameters in this setting is not known a priori; the high-quality rollouts drawn during the sampling stage therefore act as the implicit "teacher" that guides every parameter update. However, mainstream RL algorithms such as GRPO adopt a simple sampling scheme that conditions all rollouts on the same original prompt. When a task lies beyond the policy model's current capability, this sampling scheme rarely yields a high-quality rollout, leaving the policy model without a meaningful gradient direction when updating its parameters, which causes training to stall. To address this issue, we propose FBOS-RL. Specifically, we let the model perform Feedback-Guided Exploration Enhancement based on the feedback provided by the environment, and on top of this we design two mutually reinforcing training objectives: EPA and ECC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EPA and ECC can mutually reinforce each other, forming a positive flywheel effect that significantly improves both the training efficiency and the final performance ceiling of reinforcement learning. Specifically, under both an identical number of rollouts and the same number of training steps, FBOS-RL learns substantially faster than GRPO and feedback-based baselines and ultimately attains a higher performance ceiling, while exhibiting higher policy entropy and lower gradient norms throughout training.

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

Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive real-time rendering, it frequently struggles to synthesize high-frequency textures, a limitation heavily exacerbated in memory-constrained and rate-distortion-optimized (RDO) pipelines. To address this, we propose a versatile 2D perceptual wrapper that enhances the rendered outputs of existing 3DGS representations in a content- and view-dependent manner. Our method leverages a lightweight synthesis network conditioned on pseudo-random Gaussian noise to synthesize perceptually plausible textures. Supervised by Wasserstein Distortion, the network learns to match local feature statistics rather than strictly enforcing pixel-wise reconstruction fidelity, effectively mitigating the blurriness inherent in standard frameworks. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our plug-and-play approach across vanilla, memory-constrained, and RDO 3DGS methods. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments confirm that our method significantly improves over existing baselines, yielding superior perceptual quality at sharply reduced file or model sizes.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stationary measures for higher spin vertex models on a strip

Authors:

arXiv:2309.04897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a higher spin vertex model on a strip with fused vertex weights. This model can be regarded as a generalization of both the unfused six-vertex model on a strip arXiv:2212.09111 and an 'integrable two-step Floquet dynamics' model introduced in arXiv:1711.08884. We solve for the stationary measure using a fused version of the matrix product ansatz and then characterize it in terms of the Askey-Wilson process. Using this characterization, we obtain the limits of the mean density along an arbitrary down-right path. It turns out that all these models share a common phase diagram, which, after an appropriate mapping, matches the phase diagram of open ASEP. This provides evidence for the universality of this phase diagram.

04.
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.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Algorithmic-Human Manager: AI, Apps, and Workers in the Indian Gig Economy

arXiv:2606.19975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South.

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

Bioacoustic Geolocation: Species Sounds as Geographic Signals

arXiv:2505.18726v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can we determine someone's geographic location solely from the sounds they hear? Are acoustic signals enough to localize within a country, state, or even city? In this work, we tackle the challenge of global-scale audio geolocation, with a particular focus on wildlife and natural sounds. We posit that bioacoustic signals contain informative geolocation cues because of well-defined geographic ranges of species. To test this hypothesis, we benchmark image geolocation and soundscape mapping methods, design oracles and species-centric baselines, and propose a hybrid approach that combines species range prediction with retrieval-based geolocation. We further ask whether geolocation improves with species-diverse recordings and spatiotemporal aggregation across neighboring samples. Finally, we extend our study to multimodal geolocation with case studies from movies that combine both audio and visual content. Our results highlight the potential of incorporating bioacoustic signals into geospatial tasks, motivating future work on species recognition and audio geolocation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs

arXiv:2606.20244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E}

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Homomorphic Encryptions for Privacy Preserving Vision

Legal requirements might prevent organizations from sharing sensitive data like medical or financial details of consumers which prevents them from leveraging cloud based ML-as-a-service solutions provided by third party providers, which are quickly gaining popularity these days. In this project, we aim to perform inference tasks in Computer Vision in a privacy-preserving manner, i.e, by only looking at encrypted data. Recent advances in fully homomorphic encryption make this possible. A fully homomorphic encryption allows an arbitrary sequence of additive and multiplicative operations to be performed on encrypted data directly. Applying homomorphic encryptions to CNNs requires modifying the conventional CNN layers, so that they adhere to the encryption scheme. Our aim was to explore the best methods to create CNNs which can classify encrypted images directly. We used Microsoft SEAL for performing homomorphic encryption. The performance of these "encryption based CNNs" should be comparable with baseline accuracies of the same CNNs trained on unencrypted data, and the aim was to achieve as low of a hit on inference-time performance as possible. We successfully obtained minimal drop in classification accuracy for various datasets. We used MNIST as our baseline, which is popularly used in related research work and then explored more complex datasets like Kuzushiji MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 as a part of our contribution. Additionally, we also added support for more complex operations on top of TenSEAL, like processing colored images (multi-channel input), applying multiple convolutional layers and performing average pooling.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mixed-State Topological Order under Coherent Noise

arXiv:2411.03441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-state phases of matter under local decoherence have recently garnered significant attention due to the ubiquitous presence of noise in current quantum processors. One of the key issues is understanding how topological quantum memory is affected by realistic coherent noise, such as random rotation noise and amplitude-damping noise. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic error threshold of the two-dimensional toric code (TC), a paradigmatic topological quantum memory, under these types of coherent noise by employing both analytical and numerical methods based on the doubled-Hilbert-space formalism. A connection between the mixed-state phase of the decohered TC and a non-Hermitian Ashkin-Teller-type statistical-mechanics model is established, and the mixed-state phase diagrams under the coherent noise are obtained. We find remarkable stability of mixed-state topological order under random rotation noise with axes near the $Y$-axis of qubits. We also identify intriguing extended critical regions at the phase boundaries, highlighting a connection with non-Hermitian physics. We argue that these phase boundaries provide upper bounds for the intrinsic error threshold, beyond which quantum error correction becomes impossible. We complement these findings by estimating the error thresholds for random rotation noise under standard quantum error correction, thereby providing lower bounds on the intrinsic error threshold.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Multi-Level Architecture for Reusable Materials Ontologies – The OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO) as Reference Implementation

arXiv:2606.14814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Materials Science and Engineering ontology landscape is fragmented along multiple axes simultaneously. Horizontally: a recent survey identified 94 ontologies of which over 40 are structurally incompatible; each new application domain – ceramics, polymers, batteries, smart materials – typically restarts ontology design from scratch. Vertically: EU regulation (CSRD, CSDDD, PPWR, CBAM, R2R, AI Act, ESPR) forces material, manufacturing, supply-chain, and lifecycle data into integrated digital product passports, leaving ontologies that only address horizontal fragmentation incomplete for any contemporary consumer. And mechanistically: a vocabulary that records that BNT-BT has $d_{33} \approx 580$ pC/N stores a fact but cannot surface why – Bi-6s$^2$ lone-pair stereo-activity, anomalous Born effective charges, soft modes, defect chemistry – without a systematic explanation skeleton. We propose a multi-level modular architecture with two independent classification axes – level of abstraction (L0 bridges, L1 material-agnostic laboratory-notebook, L2 material-class-specific, L3 categorical reasoning) and consumer audience (material vs. compliance) – in which the material-specific level is internally organised by a seven-tier mechanistic-explanation skeleton (Symmetry, Energy/DFT, Thermo/CALPHAD, Kinetics, Microstructure, Defect chemistry, Bonding) applicable to any crystalline ionic oxide. The level-and-audience modularity dissolves the horizontal fragmentation, the compliance audience absorbs the vertical regulation pressure, and the seven-tier organisation of Level 2 delivers the mechanistic explanation depth. We instantiate the architecture as the OntoCrafter Ceramics Ontology (OCO v0.94): 5,196 classes across 44 modules; 167,348 OWL axioms (40,454 logical); 1,674 properties; 829 cross-ontology bridge mappings; 1,172 SHACL shapes; 163 published competency questions.

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

Lighting-aware Unified Model for Instance Segmentation

Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently degrade under diverse real-world illumination, particularly for instance segmentation. In this work, we address this limitation by developing Lighting Convolutional-Attention (\lca{)}, an adapter module that enhances segmentation robustness without fine-tuning the heavy backbone. \lca{} employs a dual-branch architecture to process RGB features alongside contrast maps, enabling physically motivated sensitivity to structural changes rather than illumination artifacts. We optimize \lca{} through a pairwise training strategy, introducing a targeted loss term that explicitly penalizes discrepancies between clean images and their corresponding illumination variants. To evaluate and support this architecture, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across multiple existing benchmarks and present a novel Unity-based synthetic dataset specifically designed to accurately replicate complex real-world lighting conditions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully bridges the domain gap, delivering superior lighting-robust segmentation.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Partitioned Iterative Quantum Scheduling of Satellites for Urgent Disaster Response: Case study of Wildfire

arXiv:2606.12310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard in Earth-observation tasks today is having near real-time access to surface images in response to changing conditions. For instance, as urban environments interface more with wildlands and wildfires become less predictable, their tracking with satellite resources becomes essential. This requires the coordination of increasingly large constellations of satellites, giving rise to challenging computational problems. With wildfire detection and tracking as a backdrop, we investigate the power of special purpose and novel computing paradigms to tackle the ensuing satellite scheduling problems, making a compelling case for quantum algorithms. We bring quantum scheduling algorithms closer to implementation by examining both the emerging iterative quantum algorithm framework, which comes with analytic guarantees compared to some classical algorithms, and distributed quantum computing methods whose relevance is on the rise as utility-scale problems begin to get solved with quantum computers. Drawing strength from several computing fronts, we develop a distributed/parallelization scheme in conjunction with the quantum algorithm design and apply these techniques to real-world datasets for wildfire detection. While our quantum subprocesses are currently too small to see significant quantum advantage, our results validate the utility of these techniques, and continue forging the path toward distributed quantum computing.

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

Denoising Score Matching with Random Features: Insights on Diffusion Models from Precise Learning Curves

arXiv:2502.00336v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the phenomena of generalization and memorization in diffusion models. Empirical studies suggest that these phenomena are influenced by model complexity and the size of the training dataset. In our experiments, we further observe that the number of noise samples per data sample ($m$) used during Denoising Score Matching (DSM) plays a significant and non-trivial role. We capture these behaviors and shed insights into their mechanisms by deriving asymptotically precise expressions for test and train errors of DSM under a simple theoretical setting. The score function is parameterized by random features neural networks, with the target distribution being $d$-dimensional Gaussian. We operate in a regime where the dimension $d$, number of data samples $n$, and number of features $p$ tend to infinity while keeping the ratios $\psi_n=\frac{n}{d}$ and $\psi_p=\frac{p}{d}$ fixed. By characterizing the test and train errors, we identify regimes of generalization and memorization as a function of $\psi_n,\psi_p$, and $m$. Our theoretical findings are consistent with the empirical observations.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Novel loci and multi-omics risk models for rheumatoid arthritis through a million-participant genome-wide association meta-analysis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remains incompletely understood, limiting targeted prevention. In this work, genome-wide association study meta-analyses were performed for RA and seropositive RA, comprising approximately one million participants of European ancestry. Eight and six novel genomic risk loci were defined for RA and seropositive RA, and candidate causal genes were identified, highlighting relevant biological pathways, including established immune pathways and estrogen metabolism. Novel disease-specific polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were constructed, enhancing predictive performance over clinical risk factors (incremental C-statistics of 2.7 and 5.1 for RA and seropositive RA, respectively). In parallel, integrating metabolomic data into high-dimensional models enhanced risk stratification over models based on clinical risk factors and genomics, particularly for seropositive RA, where the hazard ratio of the highest decile increased from 4.869 to 5.697. These findings expand the understanding of genetic factors underlying RA and support the value of including PRSs in risk assessment, while suggesting metabolomic integration may further enhance risk stratification, particularly for seropositive RA.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

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

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

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Edits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal memory in a language model is two problems: content and reasoning skill. The brain keeps the two apart (a sparse, local engram in the hippocampus for each episode, a slow neocortex for the shared skills that interpret it), so a new fact need not overwrite everything else. Most personalization today keeps a user's facts outside the weights, in a natural-language memory file or a retrieval index. When facts are written into the model instead, the standard recipe is the per-user LoRA adapter, which does the opposite of the brain, folding content and skill into one global weight delta. Writing a user's facts as a LoRA contaminates text unrelated to them; writing the same facts as local Engram rows leaves it mathematically untouched, resulting in a roughly 33,000x smaller memory footprint. We therefore propose User as Engram: store a user's content as surgical edits to the hash-keyed memory table of an Engram model, and carry the reasoning skill in one shared adapter. This layered design matches per-user LoRA's direct recall while delivering 5.6x higher indirect-reasoning accuracy on average, and never makes a single user worse at reasoning than the untouched base. The edit is a glass box: writing a fact switches on its lookup at exactly the trigger, adds the value the answer needs, leaves every other position unchanged to the last bit, and fails if written into the wrong layer. Because different users' facts land in disjoint hash slots, their edits compose: many users live in one shared table at once, stacking additively and losslessly, where a per-user LoRA, a single global weight delta, admits only one. Upon retrieval, a per-user Engram table does not grow with the population the retriever must search, so past ~100 facts it overtakes a retrieval pipeline on a 2.5x larger model.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-13

Projected population level impact and cost-effectiveness of clinic and community-based tuberculosis screening approaches

The South Africa National Department of Health have set ambitious targets to scale up TB testing, focusing primarily on clinic attendees. In the context of declining funding for TB care and prevention, the most cost-effective approaches for targeting testing should be identified. We developed a mathematical model of TB in South Africa, explicitly incorporating clinic attendance by sex and HIV/ART status. We simulated six screening approaches over 2026-2035 (individually and in combination): three clinic-based (symptom screening, intensified targeted universal TB testing [TUTT, symptom-agnostic sputum testing of clinic attendees in key risk groups], and intensified TUTT allowing saliva samples) and three targeted community-based (community radiographic screening, symptom screening, and universal Xpert Ultra testing), each implemented at a range of coverage levels. Model outputs were combined with a mechanistic cost function to estimate potential impact and cost-effectiveness from a societal perspective. The most cost-effective standalone approach was community radiographic screening at 10% annual population coverage, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of $421 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) averted. 10/11 scenarios along the expansion path included community radiographic screening at progressively higher coverage, combined with a clinic-based approach. Combining complementary approaches to reach both groups at increased risk of TB (e.g. clinic-based screening) and groups with lower screening coverage (e.g. community-based screening) may increase cost-effectiveness of TB screening, compared to standalone approaches. When designing TB screening strategies, both population risk and existing screening coverage should be considered.

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

Open-Vocabulary BEV Segmentation with 3D-Aware Geometric Constraints

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception fuses multi-camera images into a unified top-down representation for autonomous driving. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art methods remain confined to closed-set scenarios, making them vulnerable to unpredictable real-world environments. In this work, we introduce open-vocabulary BEV segmentation (OVBS), which leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to recognize categories beyond the training set while maintaining precise BEV perception and real-time efficiency. A key challenge in OVBS lies in the 3D geometric inconsistency inherent in the ill-posed lifting of 2D VLM semantics into BEV. To address this, we propose OVBEVSeg, a geometry-aware OVBS framework that enhances efficient Gaussian splatting (GS)-based unprojection by leveraging robust 3D geometric constraints across three progressive stages: (1) 2D-to-BEV pseudo-labeling via reliable 3D projection for OV generalization; (2) joint 2D-BEV per-scene optimization with BEV structural constraints for 3D geometric consistency; and (3) 3D geometric distillation for online efficiency. On the nuScenes dataset, OVBEVSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming closed-set methods by 15.3 mIoU on unseen categories. Remarkably, even with no novel-class ground-truth labels, it remains competitive with self- and semi-supervised baselines trained with up to 40% of ground-truth annotations. Furthermore, it achieves 2.5x faster inference with only 0.22x the memory consumption of projection-based methods. Project page: https://hchoi256.github.io/projects/ovbevseg/.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Logit Distance Bounds Representational Similarity

arXiv:2602.15438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For a broad family of discriminative models that includes autoregressive language models, identifiability results imply that if two models induce the same conditional distributions, then their internal representations are equal up to an invertible linear transformation. We ask whether an analogous conclusion holds approximately when the distributions are close instead of equal. Building on the observation of Nielsen et al. (2025) that closeness in KL divergence need not imply high linear representational similarity, we study a distributional distance based on logit differences and show that closeness in this distance does yield linear similarity guarantees. Specifically, we define a representational dissimilarity measure based on the models' identifiability class and prove that it is bounded by the logit distance. We further show that, when model probabilities are bounded away from zero, KL divergence upper-bounds logit distance; yet the resulting bound fails to provide nontrivial control in practice. As a consequence, KL-based distillation can match a teacher's predictions while failing to preserve linear representational properties, such as linear-probe recoverability of human-interpretable concepts. In distillation experiments on synthetic and image datasets, logit-distance distillation yields students with higher linear representational similarity and better preservation of the teacher's linearly recoverable concepts.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

The use of Peres lattices in periodically driven systems

arXiv:2606.20009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the strength of the method of Peres lattices in periodically driven quantum systems. The method, which has previously been used mostly in stationary systems, enables us to efficiently detect resonances in the driven system, to monitor the onset of chaos, and to recognize critical properties of the Floquet modes. It also allows quick comparisons of the spectra of Floquet modes for various driving Hamiltonians and transparent tests of the iterative approximation techniques based on effective stationary Hamiltonians.

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

Near-Optimal Regret for Distributed Adversarial Bandits: A Black-Box Approach

arXiv:2602.06404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study distributed adversarial bandits, where $N$ agents cooperate to minimize the global average loss while observing only their own local losses. We show that the minimax regret for this problem is $\tilde{\Theta}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+K/N)T})$, where $T$ is the horizon, $K$ is the number of actions, and $\rho$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix. Our algorithm, based on a novel black-box reduction to bandits with delayed feedback, requires agents to communicate only through gossip. It achieves an upper bound that significantly improves over the previous best bound $\tilde{O}(\rho^{-1/3}(KT)^{2/3})$ of Yi and Vojnovic (2023). We complement this result with a matching lower bound, showing that the problem's difficulty decomposes into a communication cost $\rho^{-1/4}\sqrt{T}$ and a bandit cost $\sqrt{KT/N}$. We further demonstrate the versatility of our approach by deriving first-order and best-of-both-worlds bounds in the distributed adversarial setting. Finally, we extend our framework to distributed linear bandits in $R^d$, obtaining a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+1/N)dT})$, achieved with only $O(d)$ communication cost per agent and per round via a volumetric spanner.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spectral analysis of equilibration: information leakage in isolated quantum systems

arXiv:2606.12545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a unified dynamical-spectral framework for equilibration in isolated quantum systems based on a subspace coarse-graining approach. Central to our formulation is the Leakage Fidelity Function (LFF), defined as the probability that a unitarily evolving state escapes the support of its initial subspace. This quantity provides a direct, operational measure of information flow and memory loss without invoking ensemble assumptions or perturbative arguments. We derive universal bounds on temporal fluctuations of the LFF, in terms of the spectral gap structure and the square of the effective dimension, evincing that large spectral delocalization suppresses fluctuations and guarantees equilibration on average. By introducing spectral power distributions and associated entropic measures, we establish a quantitative link between phase mixing, gap participation, and dynamical stability. We further investigate the equilibration timescale by connecting the LFF to quantum speed limits, thereby revealing the average time required for equilibration. Our results provide a state-dependent, geometrically transparent perspective on how spectral complexity and subspace information leakage jointly govern irreversibility in closed quantum many-body systems.

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

AGORA: An Archive-Grounded Benchmark for Agentic Workplace Document Reasoning

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study archive-grounded reasoning: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce Agora, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model's context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.