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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fast Adiabatic Quantum Gates via Hyperfine Intermediate States

arXiv:2606.11655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The appeal of adiabatic quantum computing lies in its intrinsic robustness against various technical imperfections, making it attractive for many quantum information applications. However, it faces a fundamental challenge: accelerating the adiabatic operations while preserving adiabaticity within the qubit coherence time. In this article, we propose an electromagnetically induced transparency-based adiabatic CNOT gate protocol which harnesses atomic hyperfine intermediate states (HISs) to speed up the adiabatic evolution. The HISs, naturally-existed in two-photon transitions, often need to be suppressed due to their significant decay errors. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel method that utilizes appropriately chosen HISs not only to enhance the adiabaticity in STAY pathway but also to accelerate the population transfer in TRANSFER pathway. Through pulse optimization, we achieve adiabatic gate fidelities exceeding 0.9991 within 0.3903 {\mu}s in realistic Cs atomic setups. To demonstrate the generality of protocol we further assess the impact of decays from multiple HIS and extend our model to arbitrary number of states, providing a practical route toward fast and robust adiabatic quantum gates in Rydberg-atom platforms.

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

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bath memory as a precision resource in quantum transport

arXiv:2606.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured baths can reshape transport fluctuations in mesoscopic quantum devices, yet a predictive criterion for when this enhances precision has been lacking. We propose a route towards such precision advantages by utilizing bath memory in coherent fermionic transport through a noninteracting quantum-dot chain. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we derive a dual impedance-matching condition that synchronizes the conductor mode splitting, boundary dissipation, and bath bandwidth, and sustains constructive multimode interference across the transmission window. The analytical predictions for the optimal bath bandwidths show excellent agreement with exact nonequilibrium Green's function calculations of the transport for Lorentzian, Gaussian, and Newns spectral densities. The prescription yields an optimal bath bandwidth at which the current Fano factor is minimized and the thermodynamic and kinetic precision coefficients are simultaneously enhanced beyond their Markovian limits. The alignment of the optimal precision regime with the experimentally accessible current Fano factor minimum thus provides a practical strategy for designing precision-enhanced transport in mesoscopic platforms such as semiconductor quantum-dot arrays and ultracold fermionic channels.

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

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bioinf-Farma: supervised integration of epitope prediction and recombinant protein developability for automated vaccine candidate prioritization

Vaccine antigen discovery requires prioritizing protein candidates according to both immunogenic potential and recombinant expression feasibility. These properties are typically evaluated using separate computational tools, requiring researchers to integrate heterogeneous outputs through ad hoc workflows. Here, we present BIOINF-farma, a modular platform integrating epitope prediction and developability assessment for rational antigen selection within a unified environment. Candidates can be submitted as amino acid sequences or three-dimensional structures. When experimental structures are unavailable, BIOINF-farma automatically searches for models in AlphaFold DB or performs structure prediction using Boltz-2, ensuring a standardized structural representation for downstream analyses. Antigenicity is quantified by combining structure-based conformational epitope signals (MLCE/REBELOT-BEPPE) and sequence-based linear epitope propensity scores (BepiPred 3.0) into a protein-level Antigenicity Score, with a classification threshold optimized on a manually curated validation dataset. Developability is evaluated through two supervised Random Forest meta-learners that integrate three solubility predictors (DeepSoluE, SoluProt, Protein-Sol) and three thermal stability predictors (TemStaPro, ProLaTherm, BertThermo), whose outputs are combined into an Expression Efficiency Score (EES). By integrating complementary predictive signals, the meta-learning framework achieves greater accuracy and robustness than individual predictors while maintaining performance across a broad range of sequence identities. The Antigenicity Score effectively discriminates antigenic from non-antigenic proteins with a large effect size, whereas EES successfully distinguishes soluble from insoluble outcomes on an independent panel of recombinant proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. BIOINF-farma jointly assesses antigenicity and expression feasibility within a single framework. Its modular architecture facilitates the incorporation of future predictive methods, while its web-based interface makes the full pipeline accessible to users without programming expertise, supporting rapid candidate triage in vaccine research and emerging pathogen responses.

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

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What It Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

arXiv:2606.12442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

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

Estimating Individualized Treatment Effects in Acute Ischemic Stroke with Causal Transformation Models (TRAM-DAG): A Multi-Centre Observational Study with External RCT Validation

arXiv:2606.12623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized medicine in acute ischemic stroke requires moving beyond average treatment effects (ATE) to individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates to support treatment decisions. In acute ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has been shown to be more effective on average than lysis in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), such as the MR CLEAN study. We aim to identify which individual patients benefit most from mechanical thrombectomy compared to lysis. The outcome of interest is the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at three months, an ordinal measure of functional disability (0: no symptoms, 6: death). We demonstrate that causal transformation models on directed acyclic graphs (TRAM-DAG) can be used for ITE estimation after being fitted on observational MAGIC multi-center stroke patient data. To ensure comparability with the MR CLEAN population, which we use for validation, we train the TRAM-DAG on a MAGIC sub-population with NIHSS at admission >= 6, corresponding to one inclusion criterion of MR CLEAN. The fitted model is then used to estimate ITEs for stroke patients in the MR CLEAN population. While these ITE estimates cannot be confirmed experimentally, we show that their average is consistent with the trial's reported ATE. Furthermore, the ITE estimates correctly rank trial patients by their observed frequency of a good outcome (mRS at three months

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

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

LLMs Can Better Capture Human Judgments–With the Right Prompts

Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.

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

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

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

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

How do Self-Supervised Remote Sensing Vision Models Transfer to Downstream Tasks?

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Multi-agent rendezvous in fluid flows via reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rendezvous is a critical task for multi-agent systems, requiring agents to coordinate to meet at an unspecified location. However, achieving this in fluid environments presents a challenge, as it remains unclear how agents can exploit underlying fluid kinematics to facilitate convergence. In this study, we adopt a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to develop physics-informed rendezvous strategies in vortical flows. Compared to a naive strategy, where agents navigate toward their counterparts, MARL strategies significantly improve the rendezvous rate. MARL strategies also show transferability across varying vortex intensities, vortex scales, and swarm sizes. By breaking the symmetry of the state-action map, MARL strategy leverages a non-intuitive mechanism that prevents agents from becoming trapped in separate vortices, thereby enhancing rendezvous success. Additionally, a heuristic strategy is extracted from the learned strategy and also outperforms the naive strategy. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis demonstrates that fluid deformation impedes the rendezvous process. Large finite-time Lyapunov exponents identify where fluid effects separate adjacent agents, suggesting that targets should be planned in weak-deformation regions. Our findings reveal the important role that agent-fluid interactions play in multi-agent tasks and highlight the MARL capability to explore swarm intelligence in complex flow environments.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Persistent Homology of the Planar Wiener Sausage: Brownian Scaling and a Logarithmic Expectation Law

arXiv:2606.11248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study degree-one persistent homology of the planar Wiener-sausage filtration generated by standard Brownian motion without drift. In the drifted case, regeneration along the drift direction leads to linear-in-time laws for persistent-homological observables. In the recurrent zero-drift case, this renewal structure disappears. The organizing mechanism is instead Brownian self-similarity: the persistence diagram at time $T$ is equal in law to the image of the unit-time diagram under spatial dilation by $\sqrt T$. Consequently, large-time questions on fixed radius windows are transformed into small-radius questions for the unit-time Brownian trace. Let $B$ be standard planar Brownian motion, let $K_T=B\left(\left[0,T\right]\right)$, and let $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ be the radius-$r$ Wiener sausage. Since $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$ is connected, its first Betti number $\beta_1^T\left(r\right)$ is the number of bounded complementary components of $K_T^{\left(r\right)}$. For a bounded nonnegative Borel function $\psi$ supported in a compact interval $\left[a,b\right]\subset\left(0,\infty\right)$, we consider the smoothed Betti-curve observable $\left[r_0,r_1\right] \mathrm{\Phi}_\psi \left(T\right) = \int_{r_0}^{r_1} \beta_1^T \left( r \right) \psi \left( r \right) dr$. We prove that there exist absolute constants 0

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

Scalable Graph Condensation with Evolving Capabilities

arXiv:2502.17614v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ProGRank: Probe-Gradient Reranking to Defend Dense-Retriever RAG from Corpus Poisoning

arXiv:2603.22934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves large language model applications by grounding generation in retrieved evidence, but also introduces corpus poisoning as a new attack surface. In this setting, an adversary injects or edits passages so that they enter the Top-$K$ results for target queries and influence downstream generation. Existing defences often rely on content filtering, auxiliary models, or generator-side reasoning, which complicates deployment. We propose ProGRank, a post hoc, training-free retriever-side defence for dense-retriever RAG. ProGRank stress-tests each query–passage pair under mild randomized perturbations, extracts probe gradients from a small fixed parameter subset, and derives two instability signals: representational consistency and dispersion risk. It then combines these signals with a score gate for reranking. ProGRank preserves the original passage content, requires no retraining, and supports a surrogate-based variant when the deployed retriever is unavailable. Experiments across datasets, retrievers, attacks, and retrieval-stage and end-to-end settings show that ProGRank improves robustness and maintains a favorable robustness–utility trade-off, including under adaptive evasive attacks.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Auditing Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Research on Whether Models Truly Forget

arXiv:2606.16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge. The lack of reliable and practical auditing mechanisms can lead to critical privacy risks, such as residual information leakage. This paper initiates a systematic investigation into whether existing unlearning algorithms can truly forget the designated data. We propose the first practical and general-purpose auditing framework for machine unlearning, inspired by the concept of proof of ignorance. Our framework addresses the key practicality limitations of existing methods by eliminating the need for retraining-from-scratch baselines, avoiding the training of large numbers of shadow models, and requiring no intrusive intervention in the original training process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we first conduct validation experiments to verify its soundness and completeness. We then perform comprehensive experiments across six datasets and ten representative unlearning methods. The results demonstrate that our framework reliably distinguishes between successful and failed unlearning. In particular, we observe that retraining-based and fine-tuning-based methods can achieve effective unlearning, even when the target data remain in the original dataset. In contrast, de-optimization-based methods fail to achieve true unlearning and instead degrade the model's performance. Fisher/Hessian-based methods also fail to unlearn requested data, even formal certification is provided. Moreover, we show that our framework is robust against fake unlearning attempts and generalizes well to large language models.