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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Scalar Quantum Fields: Theory Space and its Geometry

Authors:
Viola Gattus↗Peter Millington↗

arXiv:2606.12580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalar fields provide perhaps the simplest playground in which to develop our understanding of quantum field theory. In this lecture, we consider what it means to write down a scalar quantum field theory and how we can give geometrical interpretations to the space of such theories: the theory space.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MosaicQuant: Inlier-Outlier Disaggregation for Unified 4-Bit LLM Quantization

Authors:
Yangjia Hu↗Haodong Wang↗Zicong Hong↗Qianli Liu↗Quanxin Shou↗Jian Lin↗Song Guo↗Xiaowei Shen↗Xiangjun Huang↗Dian Wang↗Jian Yang↗

4-bit quantization significantly reduces the memory footprint and accelerates the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, its limited bit-width representation struggles to faithfully capture both dense common values (inliers) and rare large-magnitude values (outliers), causing substantial accuracy degradation. Existing mixed-precision methods mitigate this by retaining outliers in high precision, but at the cost of breaking the uniformity of low-bit execution, introducing precision conversion and extra data movement that undermine practical speedup. We propose MosaicQuant, a unified 4-bit LLM quantization paradigm built on a novel principle of inlier–outlier disaggregation. Rather than elevating outlier precision, MosaicQuant quantizes the full weight matrix into a dense 4-bit base component, where inliers are captured faithfully while outlier are inevitably quantized. A sparse 4-bit residual component is then introduced to compensate for these quantization errors, selectively targeting the most error-critical weight blocks where output distortion is shown to be concentrated. However, a unified representation alone is insufficient, as naïvely executing the sparse residual as a separate kernel still breaks the unified low-bit inference pipeline. To bridge this gap, we introduce ZipperEngine, which fuses sparse block computation into the dense 4-bit GEMM kernel via an overlapped pipeline, unifying not only the representation but also the execution into a single coherent low-bit inference pipeline. Extensive experiments on LLaMA3 and Qwen3 demonstrate that MosaicQuant preserves near-FP16 accuracy while achieving up to $1.24\times$ speedup over the W16A16 baseline.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agents

Authors:
Bojie Li↗

arXiv:2606.16707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A personalized AI agent needs a user memory: a persistent model of who the user is, built across many conversations and consulted on each new one. Today this memory is almost always stored as unstructured text, a knowledge graph, or a flat store of facts, and consulted by retrieval – fetching the entries most similar to the current request. Such "bag-of-facts" memory recalls individual facts well, but because storing a fact and acting on it are separate steps, it struggles to resolve contradictions, aggregate over many records, or enforce rules. We argue that user memory should instead be executable. We introduce User as Code (UaC), a paradigm in which an agent's model of a user is a living software project: typed Python objects hold the user's state and ordinary Python functions encode the rules that govern it, so representing and reasoning about the user happen in one medium an interpreter can run. The enabling mechanism is a two-phase pipeline: an append-only log that never discards a fact, periodically checkpointed into typed code. This changes what memory can do. On standard long-term conversation benchmarks, UaC matches both a full-context upper bound and the strongest prior memory systems on recall (78.8% on LOCOMO). Its advantage emerges where representation matters most. On aggregate questions over a user's history – "how many international trips did I take last year?" – retrieval-based memory collapses (6-43%) while UaC stays near-perfect (99%), because the answer is a one-line computation over typed state rather than a search over text. And because its rules execute deterministically whenever the state changes, UaC can surface unsolicited, safety-critical alerts – such as a newly prescribed drug that conflicts with an allergy recorded months earlier – a capability query-driven memory cannot provide.

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04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

How the zebrafish brain weaves recent experiences into future decisions

Authors: Unknown Author

Animals often use recent experience to guide future choices. Whole-brain imaging in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) reveals a dedicated neural circuit that governs history-biased decisions: the thalamus maintains the most recent event as a stable pattern of neuronal activity, and the brainstem integrates recent experiences into a continuous signal that biases future action. Whole-brain calcium imaging in the zebrafish reveals how information about events in the recent past drives future behaviour.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Perron–Frobenius Operator Matching for Generative Modeling

Authors:
Shiqi Zhang↗Wuwei Wu↗Jaemin Oh↗Jie Chen↗Xiaoning Qian↗

arXiv:2606.17465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Perron–Frobenius Operator Matching (PFOM), a generative framework that matches density evolution via the integral PF operator, subsuming flow, diffusion, and jump models. We prove that among Bregman divergences, only Kullback–Leibler divergence preserves equality between density-level and sample-conditioned objectives, yielding a practical loss equivalent to Koopman path matching. We further develop Nesterov-accelerated training and sampling that stabilize discretization and accelerate convergence. %On Gaussian mixtures and two-moons, PFOM achieves faster KL/$W_2$/MMD decrease and improved wall-clock efficiency with empirical validation. PFOM unifies operator-theoretic identification with modern generative modeling and opens paths to adaptive dictionaries and high-dimensional applications.

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

UI2Code^N: UI-to-Code Generation as Interactive Visual Optimization

Authors:
Zhen Yang↗Wenyi Hong↗Mingde Xu↗Xinyue Fan↗Weihan Wang↗Jiale Cheng↗Xiaotao Gu↗Jie Tang↗

UI-to-code aims to translate UI screenshots into executable front-end code. Despite progress with vision-language models (VLMs), most existing methods formulate UI-to-code as a single-pass generation, which mismatches real-world UI development that is inherently iterative and feedback-driven. We reformulate UI-to-code as an interactive visual optimization problem, where code generation is embedded in a closed-loop process of execution, visual inspection, and iterative refinement driven by rendered visual feedback. To address the non-differentiability of visual objectives and the noise of absolute visual evaluators, we propose Relative Visual Policy Optimization (RVPO), a preference-based reinforcement learning method that optimizes relative visual rankings among rendered candidates under execution feedback. We instantiate this paradigm in UI2Code^N, an open-source 9B model trained via continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UI drafting, UI polishing, and UI editing benchmarks, even outperforming larger models, with performance consistently improving through iterative visual optimization. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zai-org/UI2Code_N.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

Authors:
Jiyoung Moon↗Yonggi Jo↗Zaeill Kim↗Yong Sup Ihn↗Nam Hun Park↗

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VISA: VLM-Guided Instance Semantic Auditing for 3D Occupancy World Models

Authors:
Ruiqi Xian↗Yuehan Xian↗Jing Liang↗Xuewei Qi↗Dinesh Manocha↗

Semantic 3D occupancy provides a voxelized world state for autonomous driving and robot decision making, but object and rare-class errors can affect free-space interpretation, collision checking, and temporal state propagation. We show that a common VLM strategy, aligning 3D voxel or object features with crop-caption embeddings, improves text-space similarity without reliably improving closed-set occupancy mIoU. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose VISA, a training-time semantic auditing approach for existing occupancy world models. VISA queries an offline VLM on a representative crop of each physical object instance, obtains a structured audit with class hypotheses, plausible confusions, reliability, attributes, and evidence, and propagates it along the object track. The audit is grounded to matched 3D object voxels and distilled into semantic logits through reliability-weighted taxonomy, attribute-factor, and scene-level audit graph losses, while inference remains unchanged and requires no VLM. On nuScenes, averaged across three runs, VISA improves OccWorld from 19.06 to 20.05 mIoU and GaussianWorld from 21.36 to 21.91 mIoU; on GaussianWorld, object mIoU improves from 18.18 to 19.16 and rare-class mIoU from 15.60 to 16.79. These results suggest that VLMs are better suited to closed-set occupancy as reliability-aware semantic auditors than as generic caption-embedding targets.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

On the Stability of the Jacobian Matrix in Deep Neural Networks

Authors:
Benjamin Dadoun↗Soufiane Hayou↗Hanan Salam↗Mohamed El Amine Seddik↗Pierre Youssef↗

arXiv:2506.08764v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks are known to suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients as depth increases, a phenomenon closely tied to the spectral behavior of the input-output Jacobian. Prior work has identified critical initialization schemes that ensure Jacobian stability, but these analyses are typically restricted to fully connected networks with i.i.d. weights. In this work, we go significantly beyond these limitations: we establish a general stability theorem for deep neural networks that accommodates sparsity (such as that introduced by pruning) and non-i.i.d., weakly correlated weights (e.g. induced by training). Our results rely on recent advances in random matrix theory, and provide rigorous guarantees for spectral stability in a much broader class of network models. This extends the theoretical foundation for initialization schemes in modern neural networks with structured and dependent randomness.

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

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

Authors:
Yang Yu↗Shiyuan Zhang↗Yifei Sheng↗Haoxiang Ren↗Haoxin Lin↗

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

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

LiveStarPro: Proactive Streaming Video Understanding with Hierarchical Memory for Long-Horizon Streams

Authors:
Zhenyu Yang↗Kairui Zhang↗Bing Wang↗Shengsheng Qian↗Changsheng Xu↗

Despite the remarkable progress of Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs), current online architectures still struggle to simultaneously process continuous video streams, decide autonomously when to respond, and preserve long-horizon contextual memory. These obstacles undermine real-time responsiveness and cause severe forgetting throughout prolonged interactions. In this work, we introduce LiveStarPro, a live streaming assistant that is designed for proactive video understanding over long-horizon streams. The design of LiveStarPro rests on three complementary components. The first component is Streaming Verification Decoding (SVeD), an inference framework that identifies the appropriate response timing through single-pass perplexity verification, thereby eliminating the dependency on explicit silence tokens. The second component is Streaming Causal Attention Masks (SCAM), a training strategy that enforces incremental video-language alignment over variable-length streams. The third component is Tree-Structured Hierarchical Memory (TSHM), a recursive memory architecture that organizes evicted historical information into event chains and consequently enables efficient retrieval from effectively unbounded video streams. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation under realistic online conditions, we further present OmniStarPro, a large-scale benchmark that spans 15 diverse real-world scenarios and that extends to hour-scale streams for the assessment of long-term recall. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiveStarPro consistently surpasses existing methods, attaining a 28.9% improvement in semantic correctness and an 18.2% reduction in timing error, while its streaming key-value cache further yields a 1.58x inference speedup over the same model without caching. The model and the code are publicly available at https://github.com/sotayang/LiveStarPro.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Authors:
Wang↗A. L.-W↗Lamtyugina↗Jiang↗Yu↗A. T↗Lu↗Wadford↗Burnor↗Pipes↗Kantor↗Nelson↗…

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.

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

Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics: A Formal Theory of Social Intelligence Emergence Through Long-Term Interaction

Authors:
Jingyi Zhou↗Senlin Luo↗Haofan Chen↗

Current conversational AI systems have made significant progress in language generation, personalization, and long-context interaction. However, most existing methods model social behavior through isolated components such as emotion modeling, memory retrieval, or persona conditioning, lacking a unified framework to explain the emergence of stable social relationships and social intelligence in long-term human-AI interaction.To address this, we propose the Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics Framework (HACD-H), a formal model of human-AI interaction as a self-organizing social cognitive system. HACD-H integrates emotional adaptation, relational organization, social memory, and personality consistency into a unified dynamical framework and introduces principles including multi-timescale social cognition, relational attractors, trust basins, developmental phase transitions, and social cognitive energy dynamics.We construct a conversational dataset with approximately 14,700 interaction turns and develop a theory-driven empirical evaluation framework. Results reveal a hierarchy of temporal persistence in social cognition, stable relational attractors, phase-transition-like developmental patterns, and a structured social cognitive energy landscape. Social intelligence shows a significant negative correlation with social cognitive energy (r = -0.391, p < 0.001), and interaction trajectories exhibit progressive energy reduction over time.These findings suggest that social intelligence emerges from long-term social cognitive coevolution rather than isolated conversational capabilities. HACD-H provides a unified theoretical foundation for modeling adaptive human-AI social interaction and developing socially intelligent AI systems.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Dynamical Systems Perspective on the Analysis of Neural Networks

Authors:
Dennis Chemnitz↗Maximilian Engel↗Christian Kuehn↗Sara-Viola Kuntz↗

arXiv:2507.05164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this chapter, we utilize dynamical systems to analyze several aspects of machine learning algorithms. As an expository contribution we demonstrate how to re-formulate a wide variety of challenges from deep neural networks, (stochastic) gradient descent, and related topics into dynamical statements. We also tackle three concrete challenges. First, we consider the process of information propagation through a neural network, i.e., we study the input-output map for different architectures. We explain the universal embedding property for augmented neural ODEs representing arbitrary functions of given regularity, the classification of multilayer perceptrons and neural ODEs in terms of suitable function classes, and the memory-dependence in neural delay equations. Second, we consider the training aspect of neural networks dynamically. We describe a dynamical systems perspective on gradient descent and study stability for overdetermined problems. We then extend this analysis to the overparameterized setting and describe the edge of stability phenomenon, also in the context of possible explanations for implicit bias. For stochastic gradient descent, we present stability results for the overparameterized setting via Lyapunov exponents of interpolation solutions. Third, we explain several results regarding mean-field limits of neural networks. We describe a result that extends existing techniques to heterogeneous neural networks involving graph limits via digraph measures. This shows how large classes of neural networks naturally fall within the framework of Kuramoto-type models on graphs and their large-graph limits. Finally, we point out that similar strategies to use dynamics to study explainable and reliable AI can also be applied to settings such as generative models or fundamental issues in gradient training methods, such as backpropagation or vanishing/exploding gradients.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genetic basis of dynamic brain states reveals cellular and disease associations

Authors:
Ebneabbasi↗Whiteside↗D. J↗Gu↗Bethlehem↗R. A. I↗Warrier↗Rittman↗

Dynamic resting-state fMRI captures the time-varying patterns of brain activity that are obscured by static approaches. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) characterise these dynamics as recurring whole-brain states and quantify their fractional occupancy (FO), the proportion of time spent in each state, yet the biological basis of inter-individual variation in FO remains unclear. Using data from 52,335 White UK Biobank participants, with replication in East and South Asian subsamples, this study examined the heritability, cellular and neurotransmitter basis of brain states, and their links with complex phenotypes. FO was significantly heritable and enriched for neuronal populations, particularly glutamatergic and GABAergic signalling. Analyses identified shared and state-specific loci and revealed genetic correlations, colocalisation, and potential causal relationships between FO and several phenotypes, including educational attainment, sleep duration, and disease risk. These findings establish dynamic brain states as biologically grounded intermediate phenotypes, linking genetic variation to neural dynamics, diseases and traits.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

Authors:
Si-Yu Liu↗Xin-Ze Song↗Xiang-Yue Yu↗Wentao Liu↗Xiao-Li Huang↗Shu-Min Wu↗

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Inferring Cell Fate Trajectories in Time-Resolved Metabolic RNA Labeling data

Authors:
Audit↗Peyre↗Cantini↗

Single-cell RNA sequencing provides high-resolution snapshots of cellular states but lacks direct information about transcriptional dynamics. Metabolic RNA labeling addresses this limitation by distinguishing newly synthesized RNA, offering insight into the direction of cell state changes, and providing valuable information when attempting to recover the underlying continuous dynamics from static snapshots of cell distributions. However, existing trajectory inference methods do not fully exploit this additional signal. Here, we propose FLOWSATATE, a framework for single-cell trajectory inference that leverages time-resolved RNA labeling within an Optimal Transport setting. We model cell dynamics as a gradient flow in an inferred potential landscape parameterized by a neural network, integrating both total and labeled RNA across time points. The learned potential enables identification of key genes and transcription factors driving cell fate decisions and supports prediction of future cellular states. We benchmark our approach on its ability to generalize unseen data and recover coherent trajectories. We also apply it to study colorectal cancer response to demethylation treatment as well as neuronal differentiation of embryonic stem cells.

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

MM++: Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Multilayer OOD Detection via Top-K Gated Feature Fusion

Authors:
Rahim Hossain↗Md Tawheedul Islam Bhuian↗Md Farhan Shadiq↗Kyoung-Don Kang↗

We introduce MM++ (Multilayer Mahalanobis++), a fully unsupervised, strictly post-hoc, and scale-invariant framework for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. To address the trade-off between scale invariance and hierarchical expressivity, MM++ constructs a principled joint feature space. It first identifies discriminative intermediate layers by measuring entropy density drops, which mark the boundaries of sharp semantic compression. By fusing these selected layers with the terminal representation, the framework captures latent cross-layer correlations while mitigating early-layer noise. Crucially, a Ledoit-Wolf regularized tied covariance matrix stabilizes this unified space, enabling reliable distance estimation. Requiring no auxiliary OOD data, classifier fine-tuning, or architectural modifications, MM++ delivers robust performance across distinct architectures for both near- and far-OOD detection.

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

OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

Authors:
Zebang Cheng↗Shuimu Chen↗Boxue Yang↗Yuanshen Guan↗Jingyi Chen↗Zheng Lian↗Xiaojiang Peng↗Fei Ma↗LaiZhong Cui↗Qi Tian↗

Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human–AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

Authors:
Baichuan Yang↗Hao Zhan↗Minghao Mi↗Aonan Zhang↗Liang Xu↗Lijian Zhang↗

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Authors:
Ziyan Jiang↗Li An↗Yujian Liu↗Jiabao Ji↗Qiucheng Wu↗Jacob Andreas↗Yang Zhang↗Shiyu Chang↗

Computer-use agents (CUAs) approach human-level performance on standardised benchmarks but still struggle on long-horizon tasks and unseen software. Existing skill libraries address this with reusable skills, but represent the skill artifact as text only, despite the visual nature of GUI interaction. We propose VISUALSKILL: a hierarchical multimodal skill, tailored to each target application and organised as a central index over per-topic files, which the agent consumes through a load_topic MCP tool that fetches the relevant topic's text and figures on demand. We construct each skill with a two-stage pipeline that combines authored documentation with live-application UI exploration. On two CUA benchmarks, CUA-World and OSExpert-Eval, a Claude Code CLI agent backed by Claude Opus 4.6 reaches an average score of 0.456 with VISUALSKILL, a +15.3 point absolute lift over the no-skill baseline (0.303). Against a matched text-only skill that is generated from the same source content and differs from VISUALSKILL only in modality, VISUALSKILL yields a further +8.3 point absolute gain over the matched text-only skill (0.373 vs. 0.456), providing direct evidence that retaining visual figures in the skill artifact, rather than verbalizing them away, helps the agent both identify UI elements and verify workflow state after each action. Our code is available at https://github.com/XMHZZ2018/VisualSkills.

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

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Authors:
Jann Railey Montalan↗David Demitri Africa↗Jimson Paulo Layacan↗Richell Isaiah Flores↗Ivan Yuri De Leon↗Lance Calvin Gamboa↗

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

Authors:
Reyhaneh Khasseh↗E. A. Ramirez Trino↗M. A. Rajabpour↗

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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

Embedded Arena: Iterative Optimization via Hardware Feedback

Authors:
Zhihan Zhang↗Alexander Le Metzger↗Jiuyang Lyu↗Chun-Cheng Chang↗Jiayi Shao↗Yujia Liu↗Emmanuel Azuh Mensah↗Edward Wang↗Kurtis Heimerl↗Gregory D. Abowd↗Shwetak Patel↗Natasha Jaques↗…

arXiv:2606.16190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded devices from wildlife monitoring stations to clinical wearables require local AI inference due to latency, communication, or privacy constraints. Optimizing models for heterogeneous microcontrollers (MCUs) requires simultaneously satisfying hard physical constraints on memory, power, and temperature while preserving accuracy, a multidimensional optimization that is today performed manually by experts. We ask whether an LLM agent can autonomously navigate this complex, multi-turn pipeline guided by real hardware feedback, and introduce a hardware-in-the-loop agent arena in which the agent iteratively refines both model and firmware – compiling, flashing, and measuring on real hardware – to enable closed-loop optimization. Frontier models, including Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, fail entirely without hardware feedback (0% deployment success), whereas our hardware-in-the-loop formulation achieves the first successful deployment within three iterations and can surpass human expert results within seven. This agentic co-optimization achieves 250x compression for vision models with

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Authors:
Lin Zhang↗Sicheng Mo↗Zefan Cai↗Jinhong Lin↗Zihao Lin↗Jiuxiang Gu↗Krishna Kumar Singh↗Yuheng Li↗Yin Li↗

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

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