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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SCAN: A Decision-Making Framework for Effective Task Allocation with Generative AI

arXiv:2606.15601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SCAN – a human-centric decision-making framework to facilitate learners for effective task allocation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) based on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and Metacognition. In SCAN, we systematize and formalize AI-human interaction by introducing a task-identification approach with four "sub-zones": Substitute, Complement, Aid, and Non-negotiable. After describing the four sub-zones, we demonstrate how SCAN framework can be applied for knowledge workers in the workplace and students in education to metacognitively "scan" their use of Generative AI. We then discuss how such framework can be related to cognitive load theory, cognitive offloading, sycophancy, three decision-making modes in human-AI interactions (automation, augmentation, and collaboration), future of work such as upskilling and deskilling, and how it accounts for both human-human and human-AI learning. We propose that SCAN offers a great starting point before discussing whether GenAI complements or replaces our abilities when completing a task, with a general objective of sustaining lifelong learning, and a specific goal of reaching hybrid intelligence.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Wigner's Phase Space Current for Variable Beam Splitters – Phase Space Rotations and Newtonian Trajectories

arXiv:2606.24334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Beam splitters allow us to superpose two continuous single mode quantum systems. To study the behaviour of beam splitters' strongly mode mixing dynamics we consider variable beam splitters acting on Wigner's phase space distribution, W , the evolution of which is governed by the continuity-equation {\partial \tau} W = - {\nabla} J. We derive the form of the corresponding Wigner current, J. J's form allows us to use a classical trajectories-approach to analyze the influence of the two modes on each other. We show that the dynamics for variable beam splitters amounts to a rotation confined within the plane of the two positions together with the same simultaneous rotation confined within the plane of the two momenta. In this way explicit and very transparent expressions for the rotated Wigner distributions and Wigner currents can be given in terms of classical trajectories. This helps us to gain deeper insights and perform geometrical analyses of the mixing of modes at beam splitters.

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

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

PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents

Authors:

Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate – a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline – at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

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

VeriGraph: Towards Verifiable Data-Analytic Agents

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61\% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimality Condition for the Petz Map

arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.

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

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-23

CARGO: A cytometry analysis framework via Regularized graph optimal-transport

by Abida Sanjana Shemonti, Grzegorz B. Gmyrek, Katrien L. A. Quintelier, Sofie Van Gassen, Yvan Saeys, Marcella Willemsen, Joachim G. J. V. Aerts, Eva V. E. Madsen, J. Paul Robinson, Alex Pothen, Bartek Rajwa Conventional data visualization techniques in single-cell analysis (such as two-dimensional dot plots, SPADE, PCA, t-SNE, or UMAP) often fall short in enabling an intuitive understanding of high-parameter flow cytometry data. These methods tend to oversimplify complex biological relationships, lack biologically meaningful interpretations, and offer no principled framework for downstream quantitative analysis. To address these limitations, we present a graph-based (network-based) visualization framework grounded in optimal transport theory. In this framework, cell populations are defined by their marker-expression profiles, and inter-population similarity is quantified using an efficiently computable optimal transport formulation known as the Sinkhorn distance. Our approach produces biologically consistent two-dimensional graph layouts using a phenotype-aware Hamming distance. Structural differences between sample graphs are characterized through a customized graph-edit distance that captures changes in population size, marker expression, and relationships between populations. We demonstrate our methods on two flow cytometry datasets: one from a clinical trial of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy in malignant peritoneal mesothelioma, involving 14 patients sampled at three time points with 14-color panels, and another from FlowCAP-II, which involved 43 acute myeloid leukemia patient samples analyzed with 7-color panels. Our framework produces robust, quantitative visual summaries of cell populations and supports statistical analysis based on graph edit distances, thereby offering new insights into disease progression and treatment response. Ultimately, our method bridges the gap between flow cytometry data visualization and biological interpretation.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Efficacy of a Gamified Digital Platform for Substance Use Education and Overdose Prevention Among College Students: a Pilot and Feasibility Study

Background: For US young adults aged 18-25 in the 2018-2024 period, fentanyl was involved in 78.2% of the 44,020 unintentional or undetermined-intent overdose deaths, most often co-involving stimulants and other non-opioid substances. While fatal overdose rates in this age group have fallen to their lowest recorded level, emergency medical services-attended non-fatal overdose events have reached record highs, shifting the decisive variable toward bystander recognition and response. College students report near-universal alcohol education but minimal education on the substances actually driving overdose mortality. Methods: We conducted a single-group pre-post evaluation of the DopaGE Portal, a gamified, mastery-based digital platform covering cocaine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opioid overdose response, deployed at a public university (UNL) and a multi-campus volunteer network (TACO). Paired pre/post surveys (N=42) measured self-efficacy (7 items; primary), behavioral intentions, risk perception, and knowledge/attitudes on 5-point scales, plus four factual knowledge questions. Paired t-tests, exact McNemar tests, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction across eight primary tests were applied. Institutional naloxone distribution at UNL was tracked as an ecological behavioral outcome. A mandated high-school cohort (N=94) provided supplementary acceptability data. Results: Self-efficacy increased from 2.82 to 4.46 (d=2.00, 95% CI 1.46-2.55; adjusted p

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

KCSAT-ML: Probing Reasoning Models with Nationwide-Cohort Human Difficulty

Math reasoning benchmarks have proliferated, yet most lack a per-item difficulty signal grounded in actual human performance. We introduce KCSAT-ML, a decade (2014-2025) of Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT; Suneung) mathematics: 664 problems with a 339-item core set carrying official per-item error rates from nationwide cohorts of hundreds of thousands of examinees. We pair the benchmark with Difficulty-aligned Reasoning Gain (DRG): a score-orthogonal metric that asks whether a model's mistakes concentrate on the items humans found hard, or on items humans found easy. Together they expose, across a wide range of VLMs (and LLMs via OCR), three patterns: (i) low-budget accuracy collapses on the high-human-error tail at every model size; (ii) test-time scaling (TTS) raises token use roughly linearly with cohort error rate, while accuracy gains follow a non-monotonic curve; (iii) within a single family, TTS flips between anti-scaling on the hardest items and overthinking on easier ones – two faces of the same alignment failure. On DRG, models with near-identical accuracy can sit at near-opposite values: one model gets wrong what humans also find hard, while another solves the hardest items yet fails on items humans find easy – a contrast that aggregate accuracy hides. Our code and dataset builder will be open-sourced at https://github.com/naver-ai/KCSAT-ML.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Structural variant discovery and diagnostic impact in rare diseases from short-read and long-read sequencing

Rare diseases collectively affect 1 in 10 individuals, yet current genetic testing fails to identify a causal variant for most cases. At present, cytogenetic methods and/or sequencing approaches such as exome (ES) or short-read genome sequencing (srGS) represent the state-of-the-art for comprehensive clinical discovery of sequence and structural variants (SVs), including copy number variants, balanced SVs, complex SVs, and tandem repeats (TRs). Recently, long-read genome sequencing (lrGS), coupled with multiomics data, has presented great promise to resolve variation in genomic regions recalcitrant to characterization by srGS such as highly repetitive simple repeat sequences and segmental duplications. However, there are few guidelines to enable clinical interpretation of genetic variation in these highly repetitive genomic regions, and the enthusiasm of the field in adopting lrGS has made it difficult to assess the true added diagnostic yield of this technology due to widely variable and inconsistently applied analytic pipelines and variable degrees of pre-screening by ES or srGS. Here, we investigated the contribution of SVs to rare diseases using srGS as a front-line strategy when paired with highly sensitive SV discovery and evaluate the added diagnostic yield of incorporating lrGS for a subset of cases. Our srGS analysis encompassed 1,462 families (3,450 individuals) recruited through the Broad Institute Center for Mendelian Genetics and the Genomics Research to Elucidate the Genetics of Rare Diseases (GREGoR) programs. Diagnostic SVs were identified in 5.4% of cases (79/1,462), of which 80% were uniquely detectable by srGS compared to standard cytogenetic techniques. For 96 families (including 10 families with a heterozygous variant observed in a known recessive gene of clinical relevance), we performed lrGS with methylation profiling, as well as long-read transcriptomic analyses in a subset of 20 trios. Analyses with lrGS yielded over 25,000 SVs per genome, 63% of which were not captured by srGS, along with an additional ~200 rare SNV/indels per genome not previously captured and 12 differentially methylated regions per genome. Among these, we identified only one diagnostic variant not interpreted by srGS, an apparently mosaic de novo SNV in CASK that was absent in the srGS callset due to allelic imbalance. No new diagnoses were supported by long-read transcriptomics or episignatures. In this well characterized rare disease cohort, the added diagnostic yield was thus 1.04% (1/96 families). Following a systematic literature review of prior lrGS studies, we find that most reported diagnoses were detectable by srGS and that our added diagnostic yield is consistent with those prior studies. These studies emphasize the significant impact of comprehensive SV discovery in rare disease cases and further demonstrate the power for increased discovery of novel genomic variation and episignatures from lrGS. Nonetheless, they also serve to temper expectations of dramatic diagnostic advances in rare disease patients until there is more extensive annotation of the functional and clinical impact of all coding and noncoding variation uniquely accessible to lrGS with extensive reference databases spanning highly repetitive genomic sequencing that could be enabled by this transformative technology.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Distributional Statistical Models: Weak Moments, Cumulants, and a Central Limit Theorem

Authors:

arXiv:2604.20634v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many important statistical models fall outside classical moment-based methods due to the non-existence of moments or moment generating functions. We propose a generalised probabilistic framework in which a probability law is represented by a tempered distribution $T \in \mathcal{S}'$, on the same footing as a density, a distribution function, or a characteristic function. Information about the law is extracted by evaluating $T$ on test functions regularised by a given positive Schwartz kernel $\varphi \in \mathcal{S}$ – the kernel serving as a probe, not as part of the law. Expectations are defined via the action of distributions on regularised test functions, yielding well-defined weak moments, weak characteristic functions, and weak cumulants of all orders. These extend classical quantities and retain key algebraic properties such as additivity under independence and natural affine transformation rules. The main results are: (i) a systematic algebra of weak cumulants; (ii) a weak moment problem where existence of all moments holds unconditionally and uniqueness depends on the kernel, with uniqueness results under Gaussian kernels (via Hermite completeness), positive Schwartz kernels with an exponential tail bound and square-integrable densities (via a Carleman-type criterion), and kernels with exponential decay (via Denjoy-Carleman quasi-analyticity); and (iii) a weak central limit theorem formulated as convergence of weak characteristic functions to a Gaussian limit, covering cases where the classical theorem fails. The framework is illustrated with Student's $t$, stable, and hyperbolic distributions. As a statistical consequence, the weak first moment yields a consistent estimator of the location parameter in the Cauchy model, where no classical moment-based estimator exists. A full statistical treatment is given in a companion paper.

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

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

Authors:

arXiv:2511.08639v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels – about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer – defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking – accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements – declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records – demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Robust $Q$-learning for mean-field control under Wasserstein uncertainty in common noise

arXiv:2606.20356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present a robust $Q$-learning algorithm for discrete-time mean-field control problems under Wasserstein uncertainty in the common noise law. The algorithm combines a quantization-and-projection scheme with a Wasserstein dual reformulation on the common-noise space. We establish its convergence together with finite-time iteration bounds for both synchronous and asynchronous learning schemes. Numerical experiments on systemic risk and epidemic models compare the asynchronous implementation with an idealized Bellman iteration, illustrate the robustness-performance tradeoff under common-noise misspecification, and report the observed convergence behavior of the asynchronous $Q$-learning algorithm.

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

FedSPC: Shared Parameter Correction for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.13748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized federated learning (PFL) is one of the important approaches in federated learning for addressing statistical heterogeneity while enabling client-specific adaptation. Many PFL methods split the model into shared and personalized parameters, which are jointly trained on each client. However, this creates an optimization issue: shared parameters are updated by clients optimizing different local objectives, which can lead to inconsistent shared updates and weaken the shared representation. To address this problem, we propose Federated Shared Parameter Correction (FedSPC), a modular correction method for PFL. FedSPC applies control-variate correction only to the shared parameters of a given PFL method, while leaving personalized parameters unchanged. It can be integrated into three common PFL settings: shared feature extractors, shared classifiers, and fully shared models with local regularization. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet with ViT, ResNet-34, and VGG-11 show that FedSPC improves performance across representative PFL methods, including FedPer, FedRep, FedBABU, LG-FedAvg, and Ditto.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

arXiv:2606.12930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist samplable multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $\gamma$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=\Theta(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|\gamma^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/\gamma^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.

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

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quantized Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods for Distributed Optimization under Relaxed Global Geometry

arXiv:2606.11339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed optimization with stochastic gradients and finite-bit communication modeled by random (unbiased) quantization. We propose q-PDGD, a quantized stochastic primal-dual method, and analyze it under relaxed global geometry. Under restricted secant inequality (RSI), a constant step-size yields linear contraction to an explicit neighborhood determined by gradient noise, quantization distortion, and network connectivity, while a diminishing step-size achieves O(1/k) convergence without shared-minimizer assumptions. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, we obtain linear-to-neighborhood convergence in the same stochastic quantized setting. Our results match the best-known centralized stochastic rates in oracle complexity, and are supported by experiments demonstrating the predicted tradeoffs between quantization level, step-size choice, and graph structure.