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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Rapid Cavity-Based Mid-Circuit Measurement and Feedforward in a Neutral Atom Array

arXiv:2606.24869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measuring part of a quantum system in the midst of its evolution and acting on the result in real time is essential for numerous quantum information protocols. Neutral-atom arrays are a leading platform for quantum information processing, but their mid-circuit measurement-and-feedforward cycle times have remained slow, typically exceeding 1 ms. Here we demonstrate fast mid-circuit measurement and real-time feedforward in an array of atomic qubits coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. Local light shifts tune individual data qubits out of resonance with the cavity, shielding their coherence, while a near-resonant probe drives a selected qubit whose emission is collected with Purcell enhancement. Mid-circuit measurements of four qubits with sub percent infidelity reduce the coherence of a fifth unmeasured data qubit by less than 2%. We implement real-time feedforward to correct measurement-induced phase shifts and to realize an adaptive circuit for optimal quantum state discrimination and conditional state preparation. Our approach reduces the measurement-and-feedforward cycle time to below 100 $\mu$s and establishes optical cavities as a route to fast control of neutral-atom quantum systems.

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

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Signature filtering: a lightweight enhancement for statistical watermark detection in large language models

arXiv:2606.18430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Statistical watermarks help organizations attribute large language model (LLM) outputs, yet existing detectors often struggle when watermark signals are weak, texts are repetitive, or watermarks are edited. We propose signature filtering, a detection-time module that enhances watermark detection without modifying watermark embedding and text generation. It learns a small set of ``signature'' tokens whose presence makes watermark tests unreliable, and removes these tokens before detection. The signatures are obtained by solving a mixed-integer linear program on a small training set, with constraints that maximize the true positive rate. We additionally derive finite-sample and asymptotic bounds under several attacker models (color-blind, color-adaptive, and distributionally correlated). On four well-known watermark families (Kgw, Sweet, Unigram, Exp), four benchmark corpora (C4, MBPP, HumanEval, Code-Search-Net), and six LLMs (Opt-1.3b, Opt-6.7b, Llama2-13b, Llama3.1-8b, Qwen2.5-14b, Phi-3-medium-14b), 2- and 3-gram signatures raise detection rates in weak-signal and low-entropy settings from 8~31% without filtering to 78~99% with filtering, while keeping false positives controllable and often negligible. In stress tests where we scramble sentences and perturb 25~50% of tokens by dilution, deletions, and substitutions, 2-gram filters for Kgw-style watermarks preserve most of the clean-text detection gains, often matching or outperforming the advanced WinMax watermark detector. Signature filtering thus provides a simple, scalable, and model-agnostic add-on to strengthen watermark-based provenance checks for LLM text in information processing workflows.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SPHINX: First Explain, Then Explore

Generating adversarial driving scenarios is critical for evaluating and improving autonomous vehicle decision-making systems in simulation. Recent approaches, such as ChatScene and LLM-Attacker, rely primarily on the prior knowledge of Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models to generate driving scenarios procedurally. We argue that adversarial scenes should be generated based on the failure diagnosis (e.g., indecisiveness, multi-frame inconsistency) of the driving policy to specifically address the policy's weaknesses instead of relying on prior assumptions. In this paper, we propose SPHINX, a closed-loop framework for adversarial scenario synthesis guided by a simple principle: first explain, then explore. Beyond blindly exploring the scenario space, SPHINX leverages explainable artificial intelligence methods to analyze the policy, identifying key visual concepts and their influence on policy outputs, and the uncertainty of the decisions. Given the interpretable evidence extracted from the policy's own decision process, we use a vision language model to rationalize and criticize failure modes of the current policy. These critics are then used to generate targeted adversarial scenarios for policy retraining and improvement. We demonstrate that SPHINX can highlight an interpretable account of policy failures while other adversarial scene generation cannot. Across the evaluated benchmarks and test suites, SPHINX can be applied to diverse state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle architectures and yields consistent robustness improvements over existing scenario-generation methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

DSP-SLAM++: A Unified Framework for Multi-Class, High-Fidelity Object SLAM in the Wild

Existing object-aware SLAM systems force a trade-off between real-time performance, multi-class support, and the generation of high-fidelity, semantically coherent object models. To address this trade-off, we present DSP-SLAM++, which extends the DSP-SLAM framework with an asynchronous mapping pipeline for real-time performance and dedicated sensor fusion adaptations for a monocular fisheye-LiDAR suite. Experiments demonstrate that our system generates fine-grained, geometrically-complete shapes for multiple object classes while eliminating severe mapping thread bottlenecks by reducing maximum object processing latency by up to 70\% compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, enabling robust, real-time performance on a challenging 25 Hz multi-class datasets. This work makes high-fidelity, multi-class object SLAM more practical for real-world applications like autonomous driving and robotic manipulation by enabling its use on platforms with common fisheye-LiDAR sensor setups. The open-source code is available at: [github.com/AUBVRL/DSP-SLAMpp].

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

Authors:

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Lethal plague outbreaks in Lake Baikal hunter-gatherers 5,500 years ago

Plague is among the most devastating diseases in human history1. However, early strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis lacked virulence factors that are required for the bubonic form until around 3,800 years ago2,3. Consequently, the morbidity and mortality of early plague strains remain unclear. Here we describe early plague strains that are associated with two phases of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, beginning from about 5,500 years ago. These outbreaks occur across four hunter-gatherer cemeteries, with a 39% detection rate for plague infection. By reconstructing kinship pedigrees, we show that small familial groups were affected, consistent with human-to-human spread of disease, and that the first outbreak occurred within a single generation. The infections appear to have resulted in acute mortality, especially among children (aged 8 to 11 years). We further note functional differences, including in the ypm superantigen locus, which is also present in present day Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The new strains diverge ancestrally to known Y. pestis and constrain the timing of its emergence, indicating that this happened before approximately 5,700 years ago. These findings show that plague outbreaks happened earlier than previously thought and were indeed lethal. We contend that the occurrence of outbreaks among mid-Holocene hunter-gatherer communities well outside the sphere of Late Neolithic Europe challenges the notion that higher population densities and lifestyle changes during the Neolithic agricultural transition were prerequisites for plague epidemics. Analyses of ancient DNA from hunter-gatherers near Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia around 5,500 years ago indicate that highly virulent Yersinia pestis emerged earlier than previously estimated, far from the next known cases of infection in Late Neolithic Europe.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DiverseDiT: Towards Diverse Representation Learning in Diffusion Transformers

Recent breakthroughs in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized the field of visual synthesis due to their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs are not well understood. To this end, we first systematically investigate the representation dynamics of DiTs. Through analyzing the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a crucial factor for effective learning. Based on this key insight, we propose DiverseDiT, a novel framework that explicitly promotes representation diversity. DiverseDiT incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 and 512x512 demonstrate that our DiverseDiT yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes, even when tested on the challenging one-step generation setting. Furthermore, we show that DiverseDiT is complementary to existing representation learning techniques, leading to further performance gains. Our work provides valuable insights into the representation learning dynamics of DiTs and offers a practical approach for enhancing their performance.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Branching-selection particle systems and inverse first passage problems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A generalised inverse first passage problem asks whether, given a probability measure $p$ on $[0,\infty]$, one can find a boundary $b:[0,\infty]\to \mathbb{R}$ such that the stopping time:\[\tau:=\inf\left\{t:\Lambda\int_0^t \omega(W_s-b(s))ds \geq U\right\}\] has distribution $p$, where $U\sim Exp(1)$, $\Lambda\in(0,\infty)$ and $\omega$ is a monotonic decreasing function. We construct a branching-selection particle system whose hydrodynamic limit is governed by a free boundary problem and connect this to the generalised inverse first passage problem. In the $N$-particle system, particles move as independent Brownian motions, branch at a prescribed rate, and are removed at a rate proportional to their location relative to a position $b^N(t)$ which is a function of the empirical distribution. We identify the limit of $b^N$ as the solution of the inverse first passage problem.

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

Track2View: 4D-Consistent Camera-Controlled Video Generation via Paired 3D Point Tracks

Re-rendering an existing video from a novel camera viewpoint requires the output to follow the prescribed camera trajectory while preserving the appearance and dynamics of the original scene across every frame. Existing methods rely on per-frame pose embeddings, noisy point-cloud renderings, or implicit learned correspondences, none of which provides an explicit, temporally continuous link between source and target pixels. We propose Track2View, which conditions a video diffusion transformer on paired 3D point tracks: sparse trajectories of scene points projected into both the source and target camera views. These tracks provide explicit spatiotemporal correspondences that are temporally continuous by construction, encoding what content should appear where and when. At the core of Track2View is a dual-view track conditioner that transfers visual context from source to target view through parameter-free geometric operations and learned temporal aggregation, ensuring generalization to arbitrary camera trajectories without memorizing specific motions. We further introduce a data curation pipeline that extracts one-to-one track correspondences by running a 3D point tracker on temporally concatenated multi-camera view pairs. On a 400-video benchmark spanning static and dynamic scenes, Track2View achieves state-of-the-art results across visual quality, view synchronization, and camera accuracy, reducing rotation error by 30-65% and translation error by 61-72% relative to leading baselines. Project page is available at this https URL: https://qjizhi.github.io/track2view

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Ill-Posed by Design: Probing Evidence Use in VLMs

Counterfactual analysis is widely used to study evidence use in vision-language models, but its diagnostic value is limited on well-posed tasks: when several cues independently support the same answer, removing one may not change the prediction. We propose monocular metric object-size estimation as an ill-posed diagnostic setting for evidence selection: because physical size cannot be determined from a single uncalibrated image, models must rely on imperfect cues category priors, target appearance, local context, apparent image size, and scene geometry. We assemble Metric VQA ($10{,}813$ dimension queries from Objectron and $331$ tape-measured in-the-wild scenes) and evaluate $12$ open-weight VLMs ($3$–$397$\,B parameters) with counterfactual analysis decomposing six visual and language evidence channels. Even the largest VLMs tested (Qwen3-VL-235B, Qwen3.5-397B, InternVL3.5-241B) trail a text-only frontier LLM on the in-the-wild split. The diagnostic analysis shows: target identity is the most load-bearing cue, target pixels and local context help only some models, apparent size shifts predictions without a directional readout, and global scene geometry is largely unused. We analyze LoRA fine-tuning as an actionable intervention specific to metric estimation: while the task is learnable, the models do not learn to leverage scene geometry.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601.22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do LLMs Reliably Identify Correct Information Units in Aphasic Discourse?

Correct Information Units (CIUs) are central to discourse assessment in aphasia because they quantify communicative informativeness rather than linguistic form alone. However, CIU scoring is time intensive and requires trained raters. This study examined whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform token-level CIU classification from aphasic discourse transcripts. Sixteen picture-description transcripts elicited with the Cat Rescue stimulus were annotated for CIU status according to Nicholas and Brookshire (1993). The sample spanned four severity strata: control, mild, moderate, and severe aphasia. Four publicly available instruction-tuned LLMs were benchmarked under zero-shot and two few-shot prompting conditions across five stratified random seeds. Performance was evaluated against consensus human labels using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and Cohen's kappa. Zero-shot prompting was insufficient across models. In contrast, few-shot prompting yielded substantial gains and produced competitive performance for three viable models. Mean few-shot F1 scores ranged from 0.776 to 0.817 across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, with no significant differences between fixed global and per-chunk local example selection. Phi-3-mini was unstable and did not yield reliable performance. Viable models showed high recall but lower precision, suggesting systematic over-classification of tokens as CIUs. Performance also varied by discourse severity, with the weakest results in more severe aphasia. Few-shot LLM prompting can support automated CIU identification without gradient-based task training, but agreement with human annotation remains insufficient for fully autonomous use. These findings support LLM-based CIU scoring as a promising human-in-the-loop component of discourse assessment systems.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Syndrome aware mitigation of logical errors

arXiv:2512.23810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broad applications of quantum computers will require error correction (EC). However, hardware roadmaps indicate that physical qubit numbers will remain limited in the foreseeable future, leading to residual logical errors that constrain the size and accuracy of achievable computations. Recent work suggested logical error mitigation (LEM), which applies known error mitigation (EM) methods to logical errors, eliminating their effect at the cost of a runtime overhead. We introduce syndrome-aware logical error mitigation (SALEM), which mitigates logical errors conditioned on the error syndromes measured during error correction. The runtime overhead of SALEM is exponentially lower than that of LEM schemes which do not make use of syndrome data, enabling substantially larger circuit volumes that can be executed accurately. Compared to the routinely used combination of error correction and syndrome rejection (post-selection), SALEM increases the size of reliably executable computations by orders of magnitude. In the practical setting where space and time overheads are fixed and error reduction methods are compared by their resulting estimation errors, we observe a surprising phenomenon: SALEM, which tightly combines EC with EM, can outperform physical EM even above the standard fault-tolerance (pseudo) threshold. Thus, SALEM can make use of EC in regimes of physical error rates where EC is commonly deemed useless.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Authors:

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

STAR-NT: Spatiotemporal Acceleration of Real-Time Neural Transparency Rendering

arXiv:2606.16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural order-independent transparency delivers high-quality rendering of overlapping transparent surfaces, but its geometry passes and network input generation remain costly, particularly on mobile and legacy hardware. We present a spatiotemporal acceleration framework that exploits spatial and temporal coherence to reduce this overhead while preserving visual quality. Spatially, we use adaptive quadtree-based screen-space subdivision to scale geometry pass resolution according to local color variance. Temporally, selected frames reuse the previous transparency result through depth-based reprojection instead of full rendering. Together, these optimizations reduce rendering cost and integrate efficiently into existing real-time rendering pipelines.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes

arXiv:2501.08425v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics

Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HoloCell: A Generative Foundation Model for Holistic Cellular Modeling

Single-cell multi-omics technologies have recently advanced to enable the profiling of epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic layers within individual cells, offering new opportunities to characterize cellular states as integrated biological systems. However, developing a unified framework that can seamlessly integrate diverse omics modalities and remain robust to heterogeneous modality missingness remains challenging. Here we present HoloCell, to our knowledge the first generative foundation model for joint representation learning and generative modeling across all three major single-cell omics modalities, i.e., epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. HoloCell contains over 860 million parameters and is pretrained on the Human-Multi-Omics-Corpus, which comprises approximately 468 million single-cell profiles across these three omics layers, corresponding to over 425 billion tokens. HoloCell introduces a simple yet biologically grounded hierarchical tokenization strategy that encodes cis-regulatory elements, genes, and proteins as structured tokens within a shared modeling framework. We evaluated HoloCell across single-omics representation learning, paired multi-omics integration, unpaired multi-omics alignment, and cross-modal generation via iterative diffusion and remasking, demonstrating its superior performance and flexibility across diverse omics tasks. From a representation perspective, HoloCell provides a unified digital mapping of cellular states across multiple omics layers, capturing cell heterogeneity as an integrated system. From a generation perspective, its iterative diffusion and remasking framework accounts for the inherently unordered nature of biological features, enabling in silico simulation of multi-omics information flow. Together, these capabilities position HoloCell as a versatile foundation model toward the emerging concept of a virtual cell, offering both systematic characterization and generative simulation of cellular systems within a unified framework.