Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2512.05337

Symmetric Linear Dynamical Systems are Learnable from Few Observations

Authors:

Minh Vu ↗Andrey Y. Lokhov ↗Marc Vuffray ↗

arXiv:2512.05337v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the problem of learning the parameters of a $N$-dimensional stochastic linear dynamics under both full and partial observations from a single trajectory of time $T$. We introduce and analyze a new estimator that achieves a small maximum element-wise error on the recovery of symmetric dynamic matrices using only $T=\mathcal{O}(\log N)$ observations, irrespective of whether the matrix is sparse or dense. This estimator is based on the method of moments and does not rely on problem-specific regularization. This is especially important for applications such as structure discovery.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2509.06584

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

Authors:

Jan Klaers ↗Violetta Sharoglazova ↗Marius Puplauskis ↗

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11118

Data-Driven Dynamic Assortment in Online Platforms: Learning about Two Sides

Authors:

Rahul Roy ↗Nur Sunar ↗Jayashankar M. Swaminathan ↗

arXiv:2606.11118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting. In each period, a customer arrives seeking service, and the platform chooses an assortment of sellers to display. The customer then proposes a transaction to at most one seller in the assortment according to a multinomial logit choice model. After a fixed number of periods, sellers review the proposals they have received and each chooses at most one customer according to another multinomial logit choice model, after which the cycle repeats. A key challenge is that the platform does not know the choice-model parameters of either customers or sellers in advance. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a dynamic assortment problem in which both sides' choice parameters are unknown. We develop a data-driven algorithm that learns these parameters while optimizing the platform's objective over time. We evaluate performance using regret, which measures revenue loss relative to a clairvoyant benchmark that knows all parameters and customer arrivals in advance. We show that the algorithm's worst-case regret grows polylogarithmically over time, and we derive a matching lower bound, establishing its rate optimality.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24596

To Compare, or Not to Compare: On Methodological Practices in Evaluating Social Bias

Authors:

Federico Marcuzzi ↗Xuefei Ning ↗Roy Schwartz ↗Iryna Gurevych ↗

As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions. This stems largely from ignoring the structural framing of benchmark-level evaluations. To resolve this, we introduce a unified and controllable framework that standardizes heterogeneous benchmarks to systematically contrast isolated demographic assessments with forced-choice comparative settings. Crucially, this allows us to disentangle the confounding effects of Chain-of-Thought reasoning, neutral fallback options, and other structural artifacts in social bias evaluations. Our evaluation across multiple model families reveals a massive, systematic paradigm gap: while isolated assessments limit prejudice activation, comparative settings act as aggressive catalysts for latent discrimination, a shift primarily driven by underspecified contexts. Alarmingly, CoT reasoning exacerbates social biases under comparative settings, and this systemic bias persists as a deterministic prejudice even when models are provided neutral fallback options or claim to answer randomly. Finally, we demonstrate that this comparative prejudice is a generalized phenomenon that scales positively with model size. Ultimately, we offer a crucial methodological guideline: while researchers must leverage comparative settings to robustly audit hidden biases, practitioners cannot safely rely on comparative deployments in ambiguous real-world tasks.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19610

Latent Confounded Causal Discovery via Lie Bracket Geometry

Authors:

Sridhar Mahadevan ↗

arXiv:2606.19610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on Kan-Do-Calculus (KDC) has established that the boundary between passive observation and active intervention in causal inference is a category-theoretic bi-adjunction, with interventions modeled by left Kan extensions and conditioning by right Kan extensions. This paper introduces two causal discovery algorithms under latent confounding, building on the information-geometric and categorical consequences of KDC. In smooth statistical settings, Radon-Nikodym derivatives between observational and interventional measures induce local causal vector fields; failures of these fields to close under Lie brackets become computable Frobenius residuals, which we interpret as witnesses of failed visible integrability and possible latent or unmodeled structure. Our first algorithm, BRIDGE (Bracket Residuals for Interventional Discovery and Geometric Estimation), combines an interventional density or Radon-Nikodym-ratio engine with a geometric screen that proposes a high-recall family of admissible arrows, identifies non-closing visible pairs as latent-obstruction candidates, and passes the reduced family to downstream score-based or differentiable discovery routines. The second algorithmic contribution, Spectral Kan-Do Flow Matching (SKFM), learns amortized intervention fields and factors latent curvature spectrally, exposing the direct Lie-space endpoint toward which BRIDGE points. A detailed set of experiments show that both algorithms are capable of discovering causal models with latent confounders while collapsing the super-exponential space of possible DAGs by many orders of magnitude. This paper introduces a new paradigm in causal discovery, where latent structure is inferred directly from the geometry of intervention-induced flows.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12755

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:

Shuai Zeng ↗

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

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07.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24485

On the convex hull of a planar Brownian bridge with a random Gaussian endpoint

Authors:

Nikola Sandri\'c ↗Stjepan \v{S}ebek ↗Luka \v{S}imek ↗

arXiv:2606.24485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a one-parameter family of isotropic planar Gaussian processes \[ X_\sigma(t) =B_t+\sigma t Z,\qquad 0\le t\le 1,\quad 0\le \sigma\le 1, \] where $B$ is a standard ($0$-to-$0$) planar Brownian bridge on $[0,1]$, and $Z\sim \mathrm N(0,I)$ is a standard Gaussian random vector independent of $B$. The family interpolates between standard planar Brownian bridge ($\sigma=0$) and standard planar Brownian motion ($\sigma=1$). As the main result of the paper we compute the expected perimeter and area of the convex hull of the random set $\left\{X_\sigma(t) \colon 0\le t\le 1\right\}$ as closed formulas in terms of $\sigma$, and recover the classical Brownian bridge and Brownian motion values at $\sigma=0$ and $\sigma=1$. We also consider the convex hull spanned by multiple independent processes of this type and the possibilities for closed formulas in special cases. The key observation in our argument is that the isotropy property reduces the expected perimeter and area to one-dimensional quantities through the support function and Cauchy's formulas.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15998

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Authors:

Utshab Kumar Ghosh ↗Shubham Chatterjee ↗

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2503.17182

Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation

Authors:

Patrick Rim ↗Hyoungseob Park ↗Vadim Ezhov ↗Jeffrey Moon ↗Alex Wong ↗

We propose POLAR, a novel radar-guided depth estimation method that introduces polynomial fitting to efficiently transform scaleless depth predictions from pretrained monocular depth estimation (MDE) models into metric depth maps. Unlike existing approaches that rely on complex architectures or expensive sensors, our method is grounded in a fundamental insight: although MDE models often infer reasonable local depth structure within each object or local region, they may misalign these regions relative to one another, making a linear scale and shift (affine) transformation insufficient given three or more of these regions. To address this limitation, we use polynomial coefficients predicted from cheap, ubiquitous radar data to adaptively adjust predictions non-uniformly across depth ranges. In this way, POLAR generalizes beyond affine transformations and is able to correct such misalignments by introducing inflection points. Importantly, our polynomial fitting framework preserves structural consistency through a novel training objective that enforces local monotonicity via first-derivative regularization. POLAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets, outperforming existing methods by an average of 24.9% in MAE and 33.2% in RMSE, while also achieving state-of-the-art efficiency in terms of latency and computational cost.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2601.16564

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

Authors:

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19749

Benchmarking Agentic Review Systems

Authors:

Dang Nguyen ↗Wanqing Hao ↗Yanai Elazar ↗Chenhao Tan ↗

A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19771

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

Authors:

Xuanzhi Feng ↗Zhengyang Li ↗Zeyu Liu ↗Haoxi Li ↗Yuming Jiang ↗Bing Guo ↗Jingcai Guo ↗Jie Zhang ↗Song Guo ↗

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24467

CompressKV: Semantic-Retrieval-Guided KV-Cache Compression for Resource-Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Authors:

Xiaolin Lin ↗Jingcun Wang ↗Olga Kondrateva ↗Yiyu Shi ↗Bing Li ↗Grace Li Zhang ↗

arXiv:2606.24467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context large language model (LLM) inference is increasingly constrained by the memory footprint and decoding cost of key-value (KV) caches, limiting sustainable deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Existing KV cache eviction methods typically apply heuristic token scoring over all heads in GQA-based LLMs. These methods ignore the different functionalities of attention heads, leading to the eviction of critical tokens and thus degrading the performance of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose CompressKV, a resource-efficient KV-cache compression framework for GQA-based LLMs. Instead of aggregating attention scores from all heads, CompressKV identifies Semantic Retrieval Heads (SRHs) that capture both the initial and final tokens of a prompt and semantically important mid-context evidence, and uses them to select tokens whose KV pairs should be retained. Furthermore, CompressKV allocates cache budgets across layers according to offline estimates of layer-wise eviction error. Experiments on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack show that CompressKV consistently outperforms existing KV-cache eviction methods across memory budgets. Notably, it preserves over 97\% of full-cache performance using only 3\% of the KV cache on LongBench question-answering tasks and achieves 90\% accuracy with just 0.7\% KV storage on Needle-in-a-Haystack. These results demonstrate an improved resource–performance trade-off for long-context LLM inference. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TUDa-HWAI/CompressKV

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25789

A Short Note on the Generators of Controlled Quantum Gates

Authors:

Richard M. Milbradt ↗Christian B. Mendl ↗

arXiv:2606.25789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the analytical generators for arbitrary multi-qubit controlled gates. Closed forms for the generating Hamiltonians are given for gates with both multiple control and target qubits, as well as for arbitrary control conditions. This allows us to go beyond gate-based simulations of quantum circuits and incorporate decoherence and other noise in simulations of quantum computers. We exemplify this by simulating the impact of a harmonic oscillator interacting with two qubits during the application of a controlled NOT gate.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2605.20346

Forced Gap Post-Selection for Quantum LDPC Codes and their Operations

Authors:

Adam Wills ↗Theodore J. Yoder ↗Isaac Chuang ↗

arXiv:2605.20346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a simple and general post-selection strategy for high-rate quantum codes that is transferrable across decoders. After an initial baseline run, the decoder is re-run once per logical observable, and forced in these latter runs to provide a solution where the given observable has the complementary outcome. Shots are rejected that find logically complementary solutions with similar likelihoods compared to the baseline. Using the Relay-BP decoder, we benchmark the strategy on the $72$-qubit and $144$-qubit bivariate bicycle codes, as well as surgery gadgets for the latter. In comparison to previous post-selection strategies, our results offer an improved logical error rate by over a factor of $4$ on the same circuit and physical error rate, and at the same rate of post-selection. Our strategies are also lightweight, relying only on FPGA-friendly belief propagation, whereas the previous best used repeated rounds of a high-latency BP-OSD decoder.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24236

Automated Residual Plot Assessment With the R Package autovi and the Shiny Application autovi.web

Authors:

Weihao Li ↗Dianne Cook ↗Emi Tanaka ↗Susan VanderPlas ↗Klaus Ackermann ↗

Visual assessment of residual plots is a common approach for diagnosing linear models, but it relies on manual evaluation, which does not scale well and can lead to inconsistent decisions across analysts. The lineup protocol, which embeds the observed plot among null plots, can reduce subjectivity but requires even more human effort. In today's data-driven world, such tasks are well suited for automation. We present a new R package that uses a computer vision model to automate the evaluation of residual plots. An accompanying Shiny application is provided for ease of use. Given a sample of residuals, the model predicts a visual signal strength (VSS) and offers supporting information to help analysts assess model fit.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.10813

RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection

Authors:

Shuwen Xu ↗Zhitao He ↗Yi R. Fung ↗

Users rely on execution traces to observe agent behavior, diagnose failures, and ensure accountability. These traces contain rich procedural detail, including tool invocations, intermediate decisions, and error-recovery logic. Yet this detail can expose private procedural skills, allowing downstream methods to recover key formulas, thresholds, and strategies without access to model weights or skill files. To quantify this risk and evaluate protection, we construct \textsc{CapTraceBench}, a benchmark of 75 specialized long-horizon tasks and 154 curated skills across seven domains. We also introduce \textsc{RedAct} https://github.com/XuShuwenn/RedAct, a protected trace release framework that localizes protected key information, rewrites traces while preserving verifier-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for downstream provenance analysis. Across representative trace reuse methods, \textsc{RedAct} reduces normalized skill transfer (NST) from 44.7–67.1\% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while preserving audit evidence. Its standalone behavioral watermarks reach 93.6–100.0\% true detection with a false alarm rate of at most 1.9\%. These results frame public agent traces as security interfaces and show that selective redaction can reduce procedural capability leakage without removing audit evidence.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17820

Improving low-resource ASR using bilingual fine-tuning with language identification: a cross-linguistic evaluation

Authors:

Reihaneh Amooie ↗Yun Hao ↗Wietse de Vries ↗Jelske Dijkstra ↗Matt Coler ↗Martijn Wieling ↗

This study explores how bilingual fine-tuning affects automatic speech recognition (ASR) in low-resource languages. We evaluate this method across nine linguistically and geographically diverse language pairs, covering a range of language families and writing systems. To distinguish the two languages, during training, we pre-pend each input text with a language identification token. At inference, the model jointly predicts both the language and transcription from the speech input alone. As texts for which the language is incorrectly determined show low ASR performance, we also conduct a follow-up experiment in which the language identification token is provided both during training and inference. Our results show that bilingual fine-tuning can be beneficial when language identification accuracy is high, and that in cases where language identification performance is low, including the language identification token at inference helps to improve ASR performance.

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19.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.26086

On the entropic convergence for piecewise deterministic samplers: speedup and obstruction

Authors:

Pierre Monmarch\'e ↗Lihan Wang ↗

arXiv:2606.26086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For piecewise deterministic samplers such as Randomized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (RHMC), Bouncy Particle Sampler (BPS) or Zig-Zag Process (ZZP), long-time exponential convergence rates have been established in previous works using Harris or $L^2$ hypocoercivity approaches. In particular, in the $L^2$ framework, a so-called diffusive-to-ballistic speedup was known for log-concave targets, according to which the convergence rates of these samplers, with suitable parameters, are quadratically improved with respect to the standard overdamped Langevin diffusion process. A recent work by Jianfeng Lu showed that this speedup also holds for the kinetic Langevin diffusion process when the convergence is stated in terms of relative entropy, raising the question whether this also holds for piecewise deterministic samplers. The present work provides a positive and a negative answer to this: first, we show that the speedup holds in entropy for RHMC; second, we show that for BPS or ZZS, even for a standard Gaussian target, a similar result cannot hold, and even that exponential convergence (at any rate) in entropy fails.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16555

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

Authors:

Syed Izhan Khilji ↗Alireza Furutanpey ↗Schahram Dustdar ↗

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

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21.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20 DOI: HASH:5f66831cf7e2196787d9c4554883b964

RNAStabFormer: Region-Aware Multi-Task Hybrid Learning for RNA Stability Prediction from Pulse-Chase Transcriptomics

Authors:

Wang ↗Zhang ↗

RNA stability is a central layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation, yet large-scale stability labels derived from pulse-chase transcriptomics depend strongly on quantification region, time-window definition, and replicate quality control. We present RNAStabFormer, a controlled learning framework for predicting human RNA stability proxies from transcript sequence. Its core model, RAMHT, combines region-specific nucleotide Transformer encoders for CDS, and sequence, a CDS codon stream, engineered sequence-grammar features, gated fusion, and four task-specific regression heads. We construct four strict consensus labels from ENCODE BrU-seq/BruChase-seq data by crossing gene-sense and exon-sense quantification with late-chase 6 h/2 h and total-chase 6 h/0 h retention ratios, and evaluate all models on fixed repeated-random and chromosome-holdout splits. Across chromosome holdouts, XGBoost remains the strongest standalone model, with median Pearson correlations of 0.504, 0.544, 0.546, and 0.778 on the four labels. RAMHT is competitive with raw-sequence deep models but does not universally exceed engineered-feature baselines. A strict nested RAMHT–XGBoost blend nevertheless improves gene total-chase prediction by 0.017 mean Pearson and exon late-chase prediction by 0.004 mean Pearson over XGBoost. Region and mechanism analyses show that CDS, local k-mer composition, and codon-sensitive signals dominate predictive information. RNAStabFormer therefore provides both a multi-task neural model and a leakage-controlled evaluation protocol for RNA stability prediction from pulse-chase data.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16167

AI Pluralism and the Worlds It Misses

Authors:

Rashid Mushkani ↗

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

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2604.19196

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Authors:

Mika Feng ↗Pierre Gallin-Martel ↗Koichi Ito ↗Takafumi Aoki ↗

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.25600

Two-dimensional Hyperbolic RNN Neural Quantum State

Authors:

H. L. Dao ↗

arXiv:2606.25600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the first part of this work, we construct the first type of two-dimensional (2D) hyperbolic neural quantum state (NQS) in the form of the Lorentz 2DRNN (Recurrent Neural Network) and benchmark its performance against the Euclidean 2DRNN in the paradigmatic $N\times N$ 2D Transverse Field Ising Model (2DTFIM) setting with different lattice sizes up to $N=12$ and at different transverse magnetic field strengths. We find that hyperbolic Lorentz 2DRNN NQS definitively outperform Euclidean 2DRNN NQS when the system is at the phase transition point when the physics can be described by a conformal field theory (CFT), which is known to be dual to an Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) space whose spatial geometry is hyperbolic. In the second part of this work, we benchmark the performances of the recently introduced one-dimensional (1D) hyperbolic NQS including Poincaré RNN/GRU and Lorentz RNN/GRU against their Euclidean NQS versions in $N\times N$ 2DTFIM, which has to be converted to a one-dimensional setting to allow for the use of 1D NQS. The findings in this case extend our previous results that 1D hyperbolic NQS definitively outperform 1D Euclidean NQS, thanks to the combined effects of the hierarchical structure comprising the first and $N^{th}$ neighbor interactions present in the 1D system arising from the 2D lattice and the CFT physics at the critical point. While more studies with larger system sizes are required, our work serves as a proof-of-concept for the utility, effectiveness as well as the superior performances of one- and two-dimensional hyperbolic NQS ansatzes compared to the existing Euclidean NQS in many-body quantum physics systems, especially when these systems exhibit structural hierarchy or when they are at criticality, or a combination of both.

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25.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:f710aa3045b7bf61af1fb3d51a342e1b

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Authors:

Lee ↗Moll ↗Mendez ↗Prince ↗Lasky-Su ↗Lutz ↗S. M ↗Weiss ↗S. T ↗Lange ↗Kelly ↗R. S ↗…

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

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