Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13750

Tantalum as a base material for superconducting integrated circuits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of superconducting integrated circuits for quantum applications is fundamentally limited by material-related losses. Tantalum, as an emerging material for next-generation quantum circuits, has attracted considerable attention in recent years after demonstrating breakthrough performance in both superconducting microwave resonators and qubits. Concurrently, a growing body of work is devoted to the operation of tantalum-based circuits and related fabrication techniques. This interest is further stimulated by tantalum thin films polymorphism resulting in a variety of its crystalline structure, superconducting properties, coherence, etc. Furthermore, tantalum circuits exhibit distinctive features in cryogenic experiments, which have not been observed in aluminum- or niobium-based ones. In this review, we summarize the recent research of tantalum thin films growth and phase selection mechanisms on various substrates, key aspects of fabrication and performance of superconducting circuit, including a material first-principles theoretical study. In conclusion, we address a number of open issues, including the role of \b{eta}-phase impurities, the effect of hydrofluoric acid solutions on chain characteristics, and the anomalous behavior of {\alpha}-tantalum chains at cryogenic temperatures.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18782

RedactionBench

Authors:

Sean Brynj\'olfsson ↗Shashvat Jayakrishnan ↗Esha Sali ↗Diptanshu Purwar ↗Madhav Aggarwal ↗

Large Language Models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains that require redaction of personally identifiable information (PII). While redacting PII is a data cleaning prerequisite, existing benchmarks conflate extraction mechanics with privacy semantics. A public phone number is not equivalent to a phone number in a medical record. Whether information constitutes a violation depends heavily on who holds it, why, and in what context, fundamentally differentiating redaction from simple entity recognition. Grounded in contextual integrity, we introduce RedactionBench, a manually annotated benchmark comprising 200 diverse documents across 11 domains, mostly seeded from real-world sources. We also introduce R-Score, a novel character-level metric that treats semantically similar redactions equally and nullifies shallow formatting choices, such as varying masking styles for phone numbers. Evaluations across Named Entity Recognition models, entity extraction Small Language Models, and frontier models equipped with agentic tools demonstrate that contextual redaction remains an unsolved problem. A human evaluation with over 80 users on RedactionBench reveals a stark dichotomy in privacy perceptions. Annotators show consensus with target labels for mandatory redactions (89.4 percent) and safe text preservations (94.1 percent), but fail to agree on contextual redactions (47.7 percent). This variance demonstrates the subjective nature of contextual privacy and motivates R-Score, which decouples contextual ambiguity from strict precision. We compare 35 models across families and report their performance in redacting PII. Finally, we release RedactionBench to establish a baseline for future privacy-preserving systems, hoping to inspire efficient model design and standardized evaluations.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14071

ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

Authors:

Ene Meco ↗Yingyi Luo ↗Emadeldeen Hamdan ↗Adam Watts ↗Ahmet Enis Cetin ↗

We propose ShearFuse-UNet, a lightweight and computationally efficient deep learning model for next-day wildfire spread prediction from multi-modal satellite data. The model integrates three complementary transform-domain branches inside each encoder block of a U-Net backbone: a 2D Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) branch, a 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) branch, and a cone-adapted digital Shearlet residual branch. The WHT and DCT branches establish orthogonal latent spaces with learnable spectral scaling and fixed soft-thresholding, while the Shearlet branch provides anisotropic, multi-directional feature decomposition that explicitly encodes the elongated edge structures characteristic of fire fronts. A learned SpectralFusion gate adaptively combines the WHT and DCT responses, and the Shearlet reconstruction is added as a residual. This three-branch design bears a loose structural analogy to transformer self-attention: the WHT and DCT branches provide complementary spectral representations that are adaptively fused, while the Shearlet branch contributes directional content through a residual pathway. Unlike self-attention, the proposed design relies on fixed mathematical transforms rather than learned projection operators, reducing parameter count and computational cost. Evaluated on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, ShearFuse-UNet achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a ResNet18-based U-Net (14M parameters, F1 = 0.589) and demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Results on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset further validate these findings across a different benchmark.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11557

Emergent mirror symmetry in the optimization of the central-spin quantum battery

Authors:

Hui-Yu Yang ↗Kun Zhang ↗Xiao-Hui Wang ↗Hai-Long Shi ↗

arXiv:2606.11557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries provide a useful setting for exploring nonequilibrium many-body effects in energy storage. Here we investigate the optimization of a quantum battery based on the central-spin model. We identify two complementary structural indicators associated with the effective charging dynamics: one yields an upper bound on the average charging power, while the other characterizes the buildup of stored energy. We show that these two indicators are jointly optimized at a distinguished initial charger excitation number, which selects a particular Dicke sector of the model. At this common optimal point, the effective charging Hamiltonian becomes exactly mirror symmetric, suggesting mirror symmetry as a useful structural indicator for optimizing quantum batteries. We further show that the corresponding optimal dynamics can be closely approximated by product initial states, in particular by spin coherent states whose excitation-number distribution is centered at the symmetry-selected point. Our results establish a direct connection between charging performance, optimal-state structure, and emergent symmetry in the central-spin quantum battery, and suggest symmetry as a useful organizing principle for efficient charging in interacting many-body quantum systems.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18594

Benchmarking Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation

Authors:

Seyed Alireza Azimi ↗Homayoon Farrahi ↗Abhishek Naik ↗Colin Bellinger ↗A. Rupam Mahmood ↗

arXiv:2606.18594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world reinforcement learning (RL), the choice of action space can play a key role in shaping motion smoothness, safety, and overall task performance. In this study, we evaluate pose increment, pose velocity, joint position increment, and joint velocity across two vision-based manipulation tasks: object picking and pushing. We train policies in simulation and deploy them to the real world using sim-to-real transfer. We find that action-space representation indeed significantly affects sim-to-real performance. In particular, we find that the joint velocity action space is best for the vision-based picking and pushing tasks in terms of smoothness and final task performance. We also provide practical guidance for RL practitioners in choosing action spaces for both simulation and real-world experiments.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14901

Generalized Kerr-Cat Qubit Codes

Authors:

Alonso Viladomat ↗Shahram Dehdashti ↗Amin Kargarian ↗Janis N\"otzel ↗Peter van Loock ↗

arXiv:2606.14901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic study of Schrödinger cat codes constructed from Kerr-type coherent states, including displaced Kerr coherent states and Barut–Girardello Kerr coherent states, each admitting two distinct families determined by the sign of the Kerr nonlinearity. By tuning the Kerr parameter and coherent-state amplitude, these states interpolate between $\mathfrak{su}(2)$, $\mathfrak{su}(1,1)$ coherent states, providing a unified and versatile foundation for this type of bosonic quantum error correction. Unlike standard two-component Schrödinger cat codes, where a single photon-loss event induces an uncorrectable bit-flip, the nonlinear phase-space structure of Kerr cat states enables simultaneous detection and correction of both photon-loss and dephasing errors within a unified recovery framework, with optimal recovery operations determined via convex optimization. We demonstrate that Kerr cat encodings significantly outperform conventional cat codes under combined loss and dephasing noise, and that judicious parameter optimization can suppress both error channels to a level that reduces the overhead of additional error correction layers. We further show that Kerr-deformed coherent-state manifolds under engineered two-photon driving emerge as effective steady states of driven-dissipative dynamics, with single-photon decoherence strongly suppressed and leakage outside the protected manifold appearing only as higher-order corrections in the deformation strength. Our extended formalism identifies generalized Kerr Schrödinger cat codes as promising candidates for fault-tolerant bosonic quantum computation in experimental platforms such as nonlinear photonics.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2502.00241

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Authors:

Shiqi He ↗Insu Jang ↗Mosharaf Chowdhury ↗

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.

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08.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.15233

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

Authors:

Rylan Malarchick ↗

arXiv:2605.15233v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass, thirty-nine days after the evidence cutoff, that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades; a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends; and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. We establish that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot by comparing the catalog against the documented control plane before the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware, and reporting the cells that moved. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, as its first application, and one of the three harms the rubric is designed to detect is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments against the access available on current hardware, carried through to a client-side structural port of the audit's selected target to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a separate machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The catalog readings will change as vendor policies shift; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

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09.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04 DOI: HASH:79f532c52004ba5e67d4f7f6a0eec4d9

CIPHER: An end-to-end framework for designing optimized aggregated spatial transcriptomics experiments

Authors:

Zachary Hemminger ↗

by Zachary Hemminger, Haley De Ocampo, Fangming Xie, Zhiqian Zhai, Jingyi Jessica Li, Roy Wollman Motivation Most imaging-based spatial transcriptomics methods measure individual genes, which limits scalability and typically requires integration with scRNA-seq to recover full cellular states. Recent approaches such as CISI, FISHnCHIPs, and ATLAS address this limitation by measuring aggregate transcriptional signatures, where multiple genes are pooled into each channel to increase throughput. While aggregate measurements improve scalability, they shift the problem from gene selection to feature design. For effective integration with scRNA-seq, these signatures must be not only discriminative in transcriptional space but also straightforward to measure, with balanced signal, sufficient dynamic range, and robustness to experimental noise. By optimizing decoding accuracy in isolation, existing methods leave substantial performance on the table. Results We present CIPHER (Cell Identity Projection using Hybridization Encoding Rules), a neural-network framework that jointly optimizes the experimental encoding matrix, i.e., the way that genes are aggregated to signatures, and the downstream cell embedding. CIPHER integrates the physical limits of imaging assays directly into its loss function, shaping the latent space to maximize discriminability while maintaining robustness to measurement noise and signal constraints. Using a large-scale mouse brain scRNA-seq reference, we show that CIPHER-designed encodings yield latent spaces with improved cell-type separability, uniform signal utilization, and greater resilience to hybridization variability, resulting in higher decoding accuracy from both simulated and experimental data. Conclusion CIPHER formulates aggregate signature design as a joint optimization problem over decoding accuracy and experimental measurability. This enables systematic, scRNA-seq-aligned feature design for scalable spatial transcriptomics based on aggregate measurements. Availability Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/wollmanlab/Design/.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.08355

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

Authors:

Xianjie Liu ↗Yiman Hu ↗Liang Wu ↗Ping Hu ↗Yixiong Zou ↗Jian Xu ↗Bo Zheng ↗

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2601.21626

HeRo-Q: A General Framework for Stable Low Bit Quantization via Hessian Conditioning

Authors:

Jinhao Zhang ↗Yunquan Zhang ↗Zicheng yan ↗Boyang Zhang ↗Jun Sun ↗Daning Cheng ↗

arXiv:2601.21626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post Training Quantization (PTQ), a mainstream model compression technique, often leads to the paradoxical 'low error, high loss' phenomenon because it focuses solely on minimizing quantization error. The root cause lies in the Hessian matrix of the LLM loss landscape: a few high curvature directions are extremely sensitive to perturbations. To address this, we propose the Hessian Robust Quantization (HeRo Q) algorithm, which applies a lightweight, learnable rotation-compression matrix to the weight space prior to quantization. This joint framework reshapes the loss landscape by reducing the largest Hessian eigenvalue and reducing its max eigenvalue, thereby significantly enhancing robustness to quantization noise. HeRo-Q requires no architectural modifications, incurs negligible computational overhead, and integrates seamlessly into existing PTQ pipelines. Experiments on Llama and Qwen models show that HeRo Q consistently outperforms state of the art methods including GPTQ, AWQ, and SpinQuant not only achieving superior performance under standard W4A8 settings, but also excelling in the highly challenging W3A16 ultra low bit regime, where it boosts GSM8K accuracy on Llama3 8B to 70.15\% and effectively avoids the logical collapse commonly seen in aggressive quantization.

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12.

PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:16faeed28171e77cd398c26de19708f2

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

Authors:

Patrick Staunton ↗

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15286

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Authors:

Guoyi Zhang ↗Peiwen Wu ↗Han Wang ↗Xiangpeng Xu ↗Xiaohu Zhang ↗

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

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14.

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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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2504.01579

Conditions for Unitarity in Timeless Quantum Theory

Authors:

Simone Rijavec ↗

arXiv:2504.01579v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum timeless approaches solve the problem of time by recovering the usual unitary evolution of quantum theory relative to a clock in a stationary quantum Universe. For some Hamiltonians of the Universe, such as those including an interaction term with the clock, the dynamics is substantially altered and can be non-unitary. This work derives necessary and sufficient conditions for the relative dynamics to be unitary and finds the general form of the unitary evolution operator. A physical interpretation of these conditions is given in terms of the clock's rate. Unitary dynamics is associated with rates that are constant in time and independent of the clock's internal structure.

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16.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:c21a0ebe4bc9414c6e1725ba7a75961d

Computer Vision for Real-Time Anatomical Navigation in Neurosurgery: First-in-Human Clinical Evaluation and Iterative Development (IDEAL Stage 1)

Authors:

Khan ↗D. Z ↗Mao ↗Wijekoon ↗Das ↗Williams ↗S. C ↗Blandford ↗Jain ↗Harris ↗Borg ↗Dorward ↗…

Introduction: Precise anatomical navigation is fundamental to safe endoscopic pituitary surgery, a high-stakes procedure characterised by a challenging learning curve. While traditional navigation systems often rely on workflow-disrupting probes or static preoperative imaging, advancements in computer vision AI (CVAI) now enable dynamic, real-time anatomical segmentation directly from live surgical video1-3. Our group has previously conducted a series of preclinical human-computer interaction studies to refine the system's design, alongside digital and high-fidelity physical simulations demonstrating the benefit of AI assistance in improving overall performance, training, and safety4-8. Building on this foundation, the current study represents a first-in-human application of real-time CVAI assistance in the neurosurgical operating room, serving to assess feasibility and safety, and to iteratively improve the system. Method: Guided by DECIDE-AI and IDEAL frameworks, this single-centre evaluation comprises an initial proof-of-concept phase (n=6) for endoscopic transsphenoidal pituitary surgeries. The AI model utilised a DINOv3-derived vision transformer architecture, deployed via a high-performance edge computing unit to achieve low-latency, real-time inference without reliance on cloud infrastructure2. Given the high-risk nature of the procedure and the early stage of clinical AI integration, the system was initially deployed as an educational adjunct on a secondary monitor, ensuring the primary surgical feed remains uncompromised. Functionality and safety were assessed via structured questionnaire, prospective observation, and blinded retrospective review of the recordings of the endoscopic surgical video feed and wider operating room environment. Continuous multi-stakeholder feedback through validated human factors surveys drove iterative technical refinements between cases. Results: Six patients with pituitary adenomas were enrolled. The CVAI system was successfully deployed in four cases, demonstrating acceptable real-time sella segmentation accuracy. Deployment failed pre-operatively in two cases owing to a single recurring system reboot bug. Iterative refinement between cases were driven by our experience and surgical team feedback. This resulted in the integration of additional anatomical structure segmentations (e.g., carotid arteries), enhanced model accuracy via training dataset expansion, and hardware firmware upgrades. Multi-stakeholder surveys demonstrated satisfactory system feasibility, usability, and acceptability among the surgical team. Both prospective observation and retrospective video review confirmed the absence of adverse events, including no significant distraction to the primary surgeon, and there were no AI-related clinical complications. Conclusion: This first-in-human early clinical evaluation demonstrates the feasibility, safety and iterative development of real-time, CVAI-based anatomical navigation during high-stakes neurosurgery. Future work will include a larger single-centre case series (IDEAL Stage 2a) with more surgical teams to further iterate the system and explore its impact on training and workflow. As the underpinning technology improves, deployment will transition to direct intra-operative decision support and integration with other intra-operative navigational technologies.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11198

The Structural Attention Tax: How Retrieval Format Hijacks In-Context Learning Independent of Content

Authors:

Yuqi Zhang ↗Di Zhang ↗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content – distinct from its semantic relevance – can independently distort the model's attention distribution. We identify and formalise a phenomenon we term the structural attention tax: knowledge graph (KG) triples, due to their relational delimiters and repeated slot patterns, capture 2-3x more attention per token than semantically equivalent natural-language text ($\hat{o}$(KG) $\approx$ 0.70 vs. $\hat{o}$(neutral) $\approx$ 0.25), compressing demonstration attention by up to 42% – regardless of whether the triples are relevant or noise. We develop a formal framework decomposing attention scores into semantic and structural components (Eq. 2), derive a compression bound (Proposition 1) connecting token-level format bias to demonstration attention loss, and show that the structural term governs how much attention is diverted while the semantic term governs whether this helps or hurts. This decoupling reveals two orthogonal axes for improving retrieval-augmented ICL: optimising retrieval quality (semantic axis) and reducing format-driven attention capture (structural axis). Empirically, across two model families (Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3-8B) and three QA benchmarks, we observe that source-task alignment dominates: task-matched BM25 retrieval achieves 58-62% on HotpotQA vs. ConceptNet's 25-27%, a >30 pp gap that dwarfs all gating strategies ($\leq$2 pp). We derive five structure-aware mitigation strategies from the framework, ranging from zero-cost prompt modifications to training-time regularisation; format flattening (S3) is validated by both accuracy and attention-level evidence from a verbalized-triple control, while structural dispersal (S1) yields mixed results that illuminate the challenges of format-level intervention.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16843

Data-Driven Decoding of Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect

Authors:

Amdjed Belaref ↗Samir Sadok ↗Zineb Noumir ↗Renaud Seguier ↗

Affective computing increasingly relies on deep learning to represent emotions, yet latent spaces often remain opaque, high-dimensional black boxes. This paper investigates whether Transformers' embeddings recover the geometric regularities of Russell's circumplex model. We unify two complementary experiments testing the hypothesis that, after training models on text and speech, their resulting latent spaces encode a topology consistent with valence-arousal and reproduce human-like neighborhood relations. Specifically, we evaluate deep representations extracted from Transformer-based text (RoBERTa) and speech (wav2vec 2.0) encoders, along with a multimodal Transformer fusion architecture, across naturalistic datasets like MSP-Podcast and controlled LLM-generated stimuli. Our analysis reveals that multimodal fusion of text and audio yields perfect topological alignment with Russell's primary emotion ordering. Furthermore, in a zero-shot setting using generic text embeddings, projected fine-grained emotion terms fall close to their established human-mapped coordinates. Our contribution is a novel, data-driven framework for validating emotion models, demonstrating that Russell's circumplex structure is intrinsically encoded in the embeddings of these modalities rather than being solely an artifact of human labeling, thereby bridging the gap between psychological theory and representation learning.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14187

Zeta: Dual Whitening for Matrix Optimization via Coordinate-Adaptive Preconditioning

Authors:

Kaiwen Chen ↗Shuhai Zhang ↗Qiuwu Chen ↗Zimo Liu ↗Linxiao Li ↗Ying Sun ↗Yuchen Li ↗Yifan Zhang ↗Bo Han ↗Mingkui Tan ↗

arXiv:2606.14187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale neural network training increasingly relies on matrix-aware optimizers that exploit the structure of weight parameters beyond element-wise adaptation. However, existing matrix-aware methods such as Muon have an underappreciated vulnerability: their core operation, Newton-Schulz iteration, depends critically on input conditioning, yet the raw momentum matrices exhibit severe coordinate-wise scale heterogeneity. In this paper, we first verify this scale heterogeneity through a chi-square uniformity test, showing that intra-matrix scale imbalance is prevalent across Transformer layers and that coordinate whitening effectively corrects it. Motivated by this finding, we propose Zeta, a dual whitening optimizer that applies coordinate whitening and spectral whitening in a strictly ordered pipeline. The ordering is not a tunable choice but follows from a mathematical dependency: coordinate whitening establishes the statistical isotropy that spectral whitening requires to function reliably. We further prove that this dual pipeline strictly reduces orthogonalization error relative to pure spectral methods by improving the condition number of the input. Empirically, Zeta matches or surpasses strong baselines across language modeling (0.6B to 8B parameters), mixture-of-experts architectures, and vision tasks, demonstrating that resolving scale imbalance before orthogonalization leads to faster convergence and better generalization. Code is available at https://gitcode.com/kevin259/MindSpeed.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.06531

A Generalized Sinkhorn Algorithm for Mean-Field Schrödinger Bridge

Authors:

Asmaa Eldesoukey ↗Yongxin Chen ↗Abhishek Halder ↗

arXiv:2604.06531v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The mean-field Schrödinger bridge (MFSB) problem concerns designing a minimum-effort controller that guides a diffusion process with nonlocal interaction to reach a given distribution from another by a fixed deadline. Unlike the standard Schrödinger bridge, the dynamical constraint for MFSB is the mean-field limit of a population of interacting agents with controls. It serves as a natural model for large-scale multi-agent systems. The MFSB is computationally challenging because the nonlocal interaction makes the problem nonconvex. We propose a generalization of the Hopf-Cole transform for MFSB and, building on it, design a Sinkhorn-type recursive algorithm to solve the associated system of integro-PDEs. Under mild assumptions on the interaction potential, we discuss convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We present numerical examples with repulsive and attractive interactions to illustrate the theoretical contributions.

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21.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15233

Sharp freezing time estimates for the subcritical Facilitated Exclusion Process

Authors:

Oriane Blondel ↗Cl\'ement Erignoux ↗Seonwoo Kim ↗Sanha Lee ↗

arXiv:2606.15233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the exact transience time of the Facilitated Exclusion Process (FEP) on the one-dimensional torus with $N$ sites. The FEP exhibits an active/inactive phase transition at critical density $1/2$, such that in the subcritical density regime $(0,1/2)$, it becomes frozen after a finite time period – the transience time or freezing time. We first show that for the FEP starting from a Bernoulli product measure of marginal density $\rho \in (0,1/2)$, the transience time has exactly the scale of $\Theta(\log^3 N)$. Secondly, we prove that in the near-critical case $\rho \simeq 1/2 - N^{-\alpha}$ for $\alpha \in (0,1)$, the transience time is polynomial and has a scale of $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$. The key idea is to estimate the typical size of locally supercritical intervals of the initial distribution, which has order $\log N$ in the subcritical case and $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$ in the near-critical case. In the subcritical case this is enough, whereas in the near-critical case we need additional dynamical decorrelation inequalities to apply this static result to estimate the freezing time.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19625

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

Authors:

Glenn Matlin ↗Chandreyi Chakraborty ↗Saehee Eom ↗Mika Okamoto ↗Rayan Castilla ↗Louis Jaburi ↗Alvin Deng ↗Taywon Min ↗Lucia Quirke ↗Stella Biderman ↗Mark Riedl ↗

We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B. Training-data attribution measures how strongly each training document influences a model's predictions on a benchmark, but document-level scores are too noisy to identify which corpus regions support which capabilities, and prior work has emphasized factual knowledge rather than reasoning. We compute gradient-based attribution (TrackStar via Bergson) over a working set drawn from the de-duplicated Dolma3 mix, aggregate influence across WebOrganizer's 24-format x 24-topic taxonomy (576 bins), and contrast benchmark pairs in a 2x2 design that varies domain (social vs. STEM) and capability type (reasoning vs. knowledge): SocialIQA and MMLU Social Sciences against ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM. Social and STEM reasoning draw on qualitatively distinct corpus regions, and the contrast is sharper at the reasoning level than at the knowledge level. Targeted machine unlearning provides partial causal validation: forgetting high-attribution topic bins (e.g., Literature for SocialIQA) degrades the aligned benchmark more than within-bin random baselines, and we open-source all code, sampling manifests, the bin-level influence matrix, and unlearning checkpoints.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12252

Using Explainability as a Training-Time Reliability Signal for Efficient ECG Classification

Authors:

Veerendhra Kumar Dangeti ↗Xiao Gu ↗Ying Weng ↗Shreyank N Gowda ↗

arXiv:2606.12252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training deep neural networks for clinical time-series analysis is computationally demanding, yet many healthcare settings lack the resources required for repeated model development and deployment. This challenge is particularly evident in electrocardiogram classification, where large datasets and long training schedules make efficiency practically important. Progressive Data Dropout reduces training cost by excluding samples from gradient updates once they are learned, but it relies on model confidence and may retain samples that are difficult due to noise or ambiguity rather than useful signal. In this work, we introduce ERTS, an explainability-based reliability training signal for efficient ECG classification. ERTS uses explanation quality during training to distinguish between informative and unreliable uncertainty. Building on progressive data selection, we compute Grad-CAM attention maps for candidate samples and derive a focus score that measures whether model predictions are supported by coherent and localised patterns. Samples with low focus are filtered out, while those with meaningful attention are prioritised for gradient updates. We evaluate ERTS across three ECG datasets and multiple backbone architectures, showing consistent improvements in macro-F1 alongside reduced effective training cost. These results suggest that explanation quality can serve as a practical signal for improving both efficiency and reliability in clinical time-series learning. Code will be released.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.01696

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Haonan Jia ↗Shichao Dong ↗Xin Dong ↗Zenghui Sun ↗Jin Wang ↗Jinsong Lan ↗Xiaoyong Zhu ↗Bo Zheng ↗Kaifu Zhang ↗

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18610

SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

Authors:

Wei-Cheng Tseng ↗Gashon Hussein ↗Yuzhu Dong ↗Allen Z. Ren ↗Lucy X. Shi ↗XuDong Wang ↗Sergey Levine ↗Zhaoshuo Li ↗Jinwei Gu ↗Florian Shkurti ↗Ming-Yu Liu ↗Quan Vuong ↗…

Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of $0.929$ and MMRV of $0.119$, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.

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