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

Mean-field limits for stochastic particle systems on dense graphs

arXiv:2606.11369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic interacting particle systems whose interaction structure is described by dense weighted directed graphs converging to a graphon. In the thermodynamic limit, we prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure process and derive a deterministic nonlinear master equation describing the macroscopic evolution. The limiting equation retains the heterogeneous interaction structure of the microscopic system through the limiting graphon, allowing for spatially non-homogeneous behaviors such as localized or community-type interactions.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

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

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.

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

SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

arXiv:2605.12513v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Influence maximization (IM) in real platforms is challenged by incomplete, noisy social graphs and non-stationary diffusion dynamics. We propose SP-GCRL, a social-propagation-aware graph contrastive reinforcement learning framework that learns end-to-end seed selection under partial observability.We first introduce a social-propagation-aware nonlinear diffusion function to model reinforcement/diminishing effects and probability drift under repeated exposure; we then construct dual structural views and perform contrastive learning to obtain node representations robust to missing edges and weak ties, while replacing expensive strategy metrics with a GAT-based regression surrogate to improve efficiency and scalability; finally, we use DDQN to learn an end-to-end seed selection policy on top of these representations. Experiments on multiple real-world networks show that SP-GCRL achieves significant gains over heuristic and learning-based baselines across budgets and topologies, while maintaining strong large-scale scalability.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cluster Aggregated GAN (CAG): A Cluster-Based Hybrid Model for Appliance Pattern Generation

arXiv:2512.22287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic appliance data are essential for developing non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms and enabling privacy preserving energy research, yet the scarcity of labeled datasets remains a significant barrier. Recent GAN-based methods have demonstrated the feasibility of synthesizing load patterns, but most existing approaches treat all devices uniformly within a single model, neglecting the behavioral differences between intermittent and continuous appliances and resulting in unstable training and limited output fidelity. To address these limitations, we propose the Cluster Aggregated GAN framework, a hybrid generative approach that routes each appliance to a specialized branch based on its behavioral characteristics. For intermittent appliances, a clustering module groups similar activation patterns and allocates dedicated generators for each cluster, ensuring that both common and rare operational modes receive adequate modeling capacity. Continuous appliances follow a separate branch that employs an LSTM-based generator to capture gradual temporal evolution while maintaining training stability through sequence compression. Extensive experiments on the UVIC smart plug dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across metrics measuring realism, diversity, and training stability, and that integrating clustering as an active generative component substantially improves both interpretability and scalability. These findings establish the proposed framework as an effective approach for synthetic load generation in non-intrusive load monitoring research.

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

Quantum Enchanced Multi-Scale CNN with Bi-directional Mamba for Crop Field Analysis

Hyperspectral image (HSI) crop analysis is essential for precision agriculture because it captures rich spectral and spatial information for accurate crop monitoring and assessment. However, HSI classification remains challenging due to high spectral dimensionality, spatial complexity, class imbalance, and limited labeled samples. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a BiSpectral Mamba-based framework that combines multi-scale convolutional feature extraction, spectral attention, bidirectional state-space modeling, and quantum-inspired learning. A multi-scale CNN backbone first extracts hierarchical spatial-spectral representations through feature fusion across multiple resolutions. A spectral attention mechanism then emphasizes informative bands while suppressing redundant and noisy channels. The refined features are processed by a BiSpectral Mamba module that captures long-range dependencies in both forward and backward directions by modeling hyperspectral feature maps as sequential tokens. In addition, class-weighted optimization and feature fusion strategies are incorporated to improve training stability and mitigate class imbalance. Experimental evaluation on the UAVHSI-Crop dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving an overall accuracy of 84.83%. The results show that integrating convolutional, attention-based, and state-space modeling components enables robust spatial-spectral feature learning for crop classification. The proposed framework also shows potential for broader agricultural and remote sensing applications, including crop disease detection, yield prediction, and soil moisture estimation, while highlighting the effectiveness of structured state-space and quantum-inspired architectures for hyperspectral image analysis.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

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

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.11190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all – a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

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

VideoWeave: Unlocking Geometric Consistency in Video Generation via Joint Geometry-Video Modeling

Large-scale video diffusion models often fail to preserve 3D structure over time, causing geometric drift and implausible motion under viewpoint changes. Existing methods usually enforce geometric consistency by using explicit geometry reconstructions, such as depth maps, point clouds, or reconstructed 3D structures, to define conditions, supervision, or reward signals, making the generator sensitive to errors from upstream geometry pipelines. We propose VideoWeave, a latent-space post-training framework that uses implicit geometry-model features to constrain the generative distribution, providing a more flexible and non-rigid form of guidance that mitigates the impact of reconstruction errors from geometry models. Specifically, VideoWeave adapts these features into geometry latents and jointly models them with video latents in a shared denoising space, allowing geometry to shape the generative distribution during training. To support this process, we build GeoVid-80K, an 80K-video dataset with paired appearance and geometry representations. Experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video generation show that VideoWeave improves geometric coherence while preserving strong visual quality. VideoWeave project page at https://videoweave.github.io/

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora

We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while allowing semantic variations in the form of substitution, insertion, and deletion. Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size, and represents words as vectors, which underpin its semantic flexibility. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: dynamic corpus-aware pruning and fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design. We theoretically analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, indicating that it can mitigate exponential growth in the search space. Empirically, on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), it attains substantially lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, our method uncovers benchmark contamination in training corpora that existing approaches miss, and it also benefits information retrieval and paraphrase detection. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

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

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

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

Price of metric universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

arXiv:2602.05790v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ (``weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as ``waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension in the case when $W$ is Gaussian. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.

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

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

Authors:

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Light slows down carbon nanotubes in water

Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’. Water-suspended carbon nanotubes move more slowly in green light, suggesting that excited electrons in the tubes couple to the water through ‘quantum friction’.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features

arXiv:2606.11911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Many-body spectral transitions through the lens of the variable-range SYK2 model

arXiv:2412.14280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a cornerstone in the study of quantum chaos and holographic quantum matter. Real-world implementations, however, deviate from the idealized all-to-all connectivity, raising questions about the robustness of its chaotic properties. In this work, we investigate a quadratic SYK model with distance-dependent interactions governed by a power-law decay. By analytically and numerically studying the spectral form factor (SFF), we uncover how transitions present in the single-particle limit carry over to the many-body system. Non-trivial cancellations in the one-loop contributions lead to a robustness of the SFF under a considerable reduction of the interaction range. Further suppression leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory around the infinite-range path-integral saddle and the appearance of new spectral regimes, marked by a higher dip and the emergence of a secondary plateau. Our results highlight the interplay between single-particle criticality and many-body dynamics, offering new insights into the quantum chaos-to-localization transition and its reflection in spectral statistics.

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

Descriptive versus Regulatory Uncertainty in Bounded Predictive Systems

arXiv:2605.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

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

GridVQA-X: A Framework for Evaluating Multimodal Explainability Methods

With the increasing development of Vision-Language Models, it becomes imperative that their predictions are readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, the field of explainability has not kept pace with the multimodal surge. While recent Multimodal Explainable AI (MxAI) methods generate explanations to attribute the interaction between different modalities, current evaluation protocols lack the ground truth required to distinguish between true cross-modal reasoning (e.g., spatial composition) and shallow cross-modal shortcuts (e.g., Bag-of-Words attribute matching). It remains unknown whether MxAI methods faithfully capture synergistic interactions or merely hallucinate reasoning on models acting as simple feature detectors. In this paper, we introduce GridVQA-X, the first diagnostic framework specifically designed to evaluate cross-modal explainability. Unlike natural datasets, GridVQA-X leverages a closed-world synthesis logic to generate unique, mathematically guaranteed explanations. We utilize this controlled environment to train paired ground-truth models on identical architectures: $M_{pure}$, which learns robust spatial-relational reasoning and $M_{spur}$, which is structurally forced to rely on cross-modal shortcuts. This behavioral divergence creates a rigorous testbed: a faithful explainer must report distinct reasoning pathways for each model. Our findings reveal that widely used methods fail to distinguish between models relying on genuine spatial-relational reasoning and those exploiting cross-modal shortcuts, highlighting a critical gap in capturing true cross-modal synergy and misrepresenting how multimodal models actually make decisions.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magic transfer in quantum spin chains

arXiv:2606.14855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication protocols based on spin chains have been extensively studied, yet their ability to transmit nonstabilizer resources has not been systematically addressed. We investigate the transport of quantum magic in spin chains through the natural dynamics of systems initialized in nonstabilizer states, and quantify the transported resource via the stabilizer norm. We analyze three experimentally feasible state-transfer protocols, ranging from noisy to (quasi-)perfect transfer, including one realizable in trapped-ion platforms. We find that the geometry of the injected state strongly influences transport: states in the lower Bloch hemisphere achieve higher transfer quality, whereas states in the upper hemisphere give rise to an efficient magic transport only beyond a threshold value of the parameter controlling the tendency towards perfect transfer. These features are robust across all protocols and identify the Hamiltonian and state properties that favor high-quality transfer. Moreover, we identify a parameter region, relevant to the initial state preparation, in which the transported magic exceeds the initial encoding, indicating that such spin systems can act as magic-amplification channels. Our results establish the conditions for efficient transport of nonstabilizer resources and demonstrate quantum magic as a sensitive probe of quantum transport beyond population dynamics.