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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The Target48 Neurodegeneration Panel: A Novel Tool for Profiling Protein Signatures in Neurodegenerative Disorders

Authors:
Hok-A-Hin↗Y. S↗Vermunt↗de Jong↗del Campo↗Vijverberg↗Lemstra↗A. W↗Pijnenburg↗Y. A. L↗Van Harten↗A. C↗…

Introduction: Novel tools for absolute quantification of established and emerging fluid neuro-biomarkers are required to advance diagnostic studies and improve biological insights. Methods: We conducted an extensive analytical and clinical validation of the Olink Target 48 Neurodegeneration panel (T48 Neuropanel) in 352 paired CSF and plasma samples from cognitively unimpaired controls (CU), Alzheimer dementia (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), n=44 per group. Comparisons with benchmark assays were performed. Results: Good detectability (CSF: 31 out of 42 assays; plasma: 38 out of 42 assays) and technical performance was observed. Benchmark assays showed good correlations, supporting method transformation formulas. Next to emerging biomarkers (MMP10, ITGB2), discriminative performance was excellent in AD: CSF pTau217: AUC=1; FTD: plasma NfL: AUC=0.952; and DLB: CSF DDC: AUC=0.901. Discussion: This analytical and clinical validation of the T48 Neuropanel highlights initial cut-offs and emerging biomarkers to aid clinical studies for the diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Highlights: The T48 Neuropanel shows robust analytical performance, with high detectability across both plasma and CSF matrices. The T48 Neuropanel validates established (i.e., pTau217, Abeta42, NfL, and GFAP) and emerging biomarkers (i.e., DDC, MMP10, ITGB2, ITGAM, NPTX2, NPTXR, SMOC1, sTREM1, and sTREM2) in CSF and plasma. CSF NfL, GFAP, ITGB2, and ITGAM and plasma GFAP were dysregulated across AD, FTD, and DLB dementias. -The multiplex design of the T48 Neuropanel enables rich biological interpretation by simultaneously quantifying established and emerging neurodegeneration biomarkers. Importantly, the inclusion of absolute quantification facilitates the establishment of cut-offs, supporting its potential for clinical translation.

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02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

Authors: Unknown Author

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MFEN:Multi-Frequency Expert Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-ID

Authors:
Xulin Li↗Yan Lu↗Bin Liu↗Qinhong Yang↗Qi Chu↗Tao Gong↗Nenghai Yu↗

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to the large modality discrepancy between visible and infrared images. We contend that this discrepancy is largely related to differing lighting conditions, including differences in light wavelength and light source type. Recently, frequency-based VI-ReID approaches have achieved notable success because frequency information can better extract identity-relevant contours and details while excluding irrelevant lighting and color. However, existing methods either do not distinguish different frequency bands or focus on only one band, which is insufficient under diverse lighting conditions. To perform comprehensive frequency domain learning, we propose a Multi-Frequency Expert Network (MFEN) that enables multi-frequency modulation and adaptively combines different bands through a mixture-of-experts design. We further introduce Random Frequency Augmentation (RFA) and Frequency Auxiliary Optimization (FAO) to better train MFEN. The three modules are complementary and jointly capture critical frequency-domain details for robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on three VI-ReID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

Authors:
Felipe P. Abreu↗Wei Chen↗

arXiv:2511.05260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Uhlmann relative amplitude between two density matrices is shown to be a generating function, through which the quantum Fisher tensor that contains both the quantum Fisher information matrix and the mean Uhlmann curvature can be obtained via differentiation over system parameters. In the pure state limit, our generating function recovers that of the quantum geometric tensor proposed by Het\'{e}nyi and L\'{e}vay, and also clarifies the fidelity and phase between two quantum states as the generating functions of the quantum metric and Berry curvature, respectively. A generic expression for the quantum Fisher tensor in terms of the Bloch representation of density matrices is derived, which facilitates the calculation of the tensor, mean Uhlmann curvature, and geometric properties derived from the quantum Fisher information matrix. Canonical ensembles of spins are adopted to demonstrate our formalism, which reveals a constant Ricci scalar, a vacuum Einstein equation, and a cosmological constant on the 3D Euclidean manifold of the magnetic field

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

Authors:
Rafael Frongillo↗Haipeng Luo↗Nishant A. Mehta↗Jon Schneider↗

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

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

Difference-Making without Making a Difference

Authors:
Sander Beckers↗

arXiv:2606.24832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over a series of seven papers, Andreas & Günther have introduced seven definitions of actual causation and have classified them as belonging to three different, competing, types of accounts: factual difference-making, counterfactual difference-making, and regularity-based. I show that their most recent - factual difference-making - definition instantiates all three types, thereby proving that these are distinctions without a difference. I further compare their novel account to the other six accounts on several crucial examples, revealing that this undermines all seven of their accounts.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Poster: Exploring the Limits of Audio-Based Detection of Turkish Phone Call Scams

Authors:
Arda Eren↗Micheal Cheung↗Youqian Zhang↗Grace Ngai↗Eugene Yujun Fu↗

Scam phone calls exploit vulnerable communities worldwide, yet research on detection has focused almost exclusively on English and other high-resource languages. In low-resource settings such as Turkish, detection is especially difficult, as annotated data is scarce and technological defenses remain limited. This research investigates how large language models (LLMs) can support scam detection in Turkish by introducing the first public multi-modal dataset of 100 aligned audio-transcript pairs of scam and benign conversations. We evaluate seven LLMs spanning three model families: Gemini 2.5 (Flash, Flash-Lite, Pro), GPT-4o, and Qwen (Max, Plus, Turbo), under three input conditions: raw audio, automatic speech-to-text transcripts, and transcripts refined by a native speaker. Our results suggest that transcript-based inputs consistently outperform direct audio processing, while human-corrected and uncorrected transcripts perform comparably. By centering a low-resource language and real world threat, this work highlights the urgent need for culturally and linguistically inclusive AI safety research and more robust multi-modal systems for fraud prevention.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Extensive Benchmark for Single-round and Multi-round Instruction-based Image Editing

Authors:
Yiwei Ma↗Ke Ye↗Weihuang Lin↗Jiayi Ji↗Xiaoshuai Sun↗Tat-Seng Chua↗Rongrong Ji↗

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

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

Revisiting Chebyshev Polynomial and Anisotropic RBF Models for Tabular Regression

Authors:
Luciano Gerber↗Huw Lloyd↗

arXiv:2602.22422v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smooth-basis models such as Chebyshev polynomial regressors and radial basis function (RBF) networks are well established in numerical analysis. Their continuously differentiable prediction surfaces suit surrogate optimisation, sensitivity analysis, and other settings where the response varies gradually with inputs. Despite these properties, smooth models seldom appear in tabular regression, where tree ensembles dominate. We ask whether they can compete, benchmarking models across 55 regression datasets organised by application domain. We develop an anisotropic RBF network with data-driven centre placement and gradient-based width optimisation, a ridge-regularised Chebyshev polynomial regressor, and a smooth-tree hybrid (Chebyshev model tree); all three are released as scikit-learn-compatible packages. We benchmark these against tree ensembles, a pre-trained transformer, and standard baselines, evaluating accuracy alongside generalisation behaviour. The transformer ranks first on accuracy across a majority of datasets, but its GPU dependence, inference latency, and dataset-size limits constrain deployment in the CPU-based settings common across applied science and industry. Among CPU-viable models, smooth models and tree ensembles are statistically tied on accuracy, but the former tend to exhibit tighter generalisation gaps. We recommend routinely including smooth-basis models in the candidate pool, particularly when downstream use benefits from tighter generalisation and gradually varying predictions.

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

Conformal Candidate Certification for Offline Model-Based Optimization

Authors:
Seungjin Choi↗

arXiv:2606.15217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline model-based optimization (MBO) proposes candidates by optimizing a surrogate trained on a fixed historical dataset. Because candidates are deliberately out-of-distribution, surrogate rankings are least reliable exactly where the optimizer is most aggressive, yet existing methods provide no per-candidate statistical certificate that a design meets a target threshold. We propose Conformal Candidate Certification (CCC), a post-hoc wrapper that attaches a calibrated one-sided lower bound to each candidate and advances only those whose bound exceeds the target. We show that entropy-regularized surrogate maximization induces a Gibbs-tilted proposal, so the same surrogate supplies importance weights for weighted conformal prediction without a separate density-ratio estimation step. In a controlled synthetic study, CCC certifies $16.7\%$ of an aggressive proposal pool with empirical coverage 0.990 at nominal 0.90, while standard conformal prediction ignoring the covariate shift collapses to 0.416 coverage.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

Authors:
Yongmin Kim↗ByeongHoon Jeon↗Sungil Kim↗

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

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

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

Authors:
Marta Gentiloni Silveri↗Giovanni Conforti↗Alain Durmus↗

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

Authors:
Marios Koulakis↗Constantin Seibold↗

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

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14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SwitchBraidNet: Quantisation-Aware Lightweight Architecture for Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface

Authors:
Gourav Siddhad↗Yogesh Kumar Meena↗

arXiv:2606.18816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that integrate motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) provide high-dimensional neural decoding but typically exceed the computational limits of embedded hardware. To address this, we propose SwitchBraidNet, a compact EEG classification architecture designed for low-power deployment. The model employs a dual-path temporal braid to extract multiscale oscillatory features, an adaptive squeeze-and-excitation spatial switch for electrode gating, and a log-variance readout layer for direct band-power encoding. Furthermore, through systematic quantisation-aware training on the OpenBMI dataset, we compared SwitchBraidNet against four established baselines across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precisions. Experimental results demonstrate superior efficiency and performance, achieving MI accuracy of 69.49% (FP16), SSVEP accuracy of 93.48% (FP32), and a hybrid information transfer rate of 64.82 bits/min (FP16). With an INT8 footprint of only 3.03 KB, SwitchBraidNet maintains high accuracy across varying numerical precisions, demonstrating its suitability for low-power embedded BCI deployment.

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

Understanding LLM Reasoning for Abstractive Summarization

Authors:
Haohan Yuan↗Haopeng Zhang↗

Reasoning has substantially improved Large Language Models (LLMs) on analytical tasks such as mathematics and code generation, but its value for abstractive summarization remains unclear. To address this gap, we adapt general reasoning strategies to the summarization setting and conduct a large-scale comparative study of 8 reasoning strategies and 3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across 8 diverse datasets, evaluating both summary quality and factual faithfulness. Our results show that reasoning is not a universal solution and its effectiveness depends strongly on the strategy and the summarization setting. In particular, we find a trade-off between summary quality and factual faithfulness. Explicit reasoning strategies often improve reference-based quality, but may weaken factual grounding, whereas implicit reasoning in LRMs shows the opposite tendency. We further find that increasing an LRM's internal reasoning budget does not reliably improve summarization and can even reduce factual consistency. These findings suggest that, for summarization, more reasoning is not always better. Effective reasoning should preserve faithful compression rather than induce over-elaboration. Our source code is publicly available.

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

ASymPO: Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization for Asynchronous LLM Post-Training Without Behavior Information

Authors:
Zehua Liu↗Yuxuan Yao↗Xiaojin Fu↗Tao Zhong↗Mingxuan Yuan↗

arXiv:2606.03070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift. Standard behavior-corrected methods control this drift with behavior-policy probabilities, importance ratios, or clipping, which requires token-aligned, versioned, and numerically consistent behavior log-probabilities across rollout and learner systems. We ask whether asynchronous group-relative RL can instead be stabilized using only current-policy probabilities. We identify a scale-imbalance failure mode: when stale responses are evaluated under the current policy, positive and negative loss terms can appear at different negative log-probability scales, so zero-sum advantages no longer imply balanced loss contributions. We propose Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization (ASymPO), which normalizes each response's token loss by its current average token negative log-probability. ASymPO requires no behavior-policy probabilities, restores response-level zero-sum balance, and preserves a nonzero learning signal. We also introduce Scaled Policy Optimization (SPO), a fixed negative-scaling baseline, and evaluate both current-policy-only objectives in asynchronous mathematical reasoning post-training.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

The $\mathbf{P}$-Completeness of Inverted Index Traversal: On the Complexity of Evaluating Boolean Query DAGs

Authors:
Amir Aavani↗

Modern AI agents increasingly rely on search infrastructure to execute complex, neuro-symbolic reasoning workflows. These workflows often compile into deeply nested, non-monotonic Boolean queries over text fields. However, standard query evaluation strategies over inverted indices face severe theoretical limits when handling these structures. Stateful iterator models (Document-at-a-Time) are structurally bounded by $NC^1$ formula evaluation, suffering a worst-case $O(2^{|Q|})$ exponential blowup in query complexity when unrolling re-convergent logic. Conversely, recursive materialization models (Term-at-a-Time) incur an $\Omega(|U|)$ space complexity penalty (the Universal Scan) when evaluating logical negation over the document universe. In this paper, we establish the theoretical boundaries of executing complex logic natively over an inverted index. We formalize a retrieval language ($\mathcal{L}_R$) based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and prove that its evaluation problem is strictly $\mathbf{P$-Complete}. To make evaluation tractable, we introduce \texttt{ComputePN}, a deterministic, sparsity-aware evaluation algorithm. By decoupling logical negation from universe-scale materialization via a novel Positive-Negative dual representation, and utilizing native DAG memoization, \texttt{ComputePN} strictly bounds evaluation time to $O(|Q| \cdot |U_{\mathit{active}}|)$. This approach successfully evaluates $\mathbf{P}$-Complete queries natively over the index, avoiding both the combinatorial tree-expansion bottleneck and the universal scan penalty, laying the formal foundation for computational retrieval.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Intrinsic spectral structure of bipartite nonlocal magic resource

Authors:
Xiao Huang↗Guanhua Chen↗Yao Yao↗

arXiv:2606.24368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bipartite nonlocal magic resource (BNMR) quantifies the irreducible nonstabilizerness residing in bipartite entanglement, yet its evaluation is intractable due to the full Hilbert space optimization. Here, we introduce a canonical encoding framework that exactly confines the BNMR of an arbitrary bipartite pure state within a minimal encoding core. This dimension reduction proves that pure-state BNMR is an intrinsic function of the nonzero Schmidt spectrum, extending its invariance from local unitary transformations to local isometries. Leveraging this spectral link, we derive the leading quadratic response of BNMR under spectral perturbations around its zeros. We apply this quadratic response to Haar-random states, deriving and numerically validating the BNMR profile: its distribution is sharply localized at the symmetric bipartition and exponentially suppressed toward asymmetric cuts, in stark contrast to the broadening Page curve of entanglement. Finally, we provide a closed-form expression for the BNMR of Schmidt rank-2 states, uncovering a hierarchy collapse in generalized GHZ states where bipartite and global nonlocal magic resources coincide exactly.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Steering without Sacrifice: Principled Training of Steering Vectors for Prompt-only Interventions

Authors:
Yuntai Bao↗Qinfeng Li↗Xinyan Yu↗Ge Su↗Wenqi Zhang↗Liu Yan↗Haiqin Weng↗Jianwei Yin↗Xuhong Zhang↗

arXiv:2605.05983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, steering vectors (SVs) have emerged as an effective and lightweight approach to steer behaviors of large language models (LLMs), among which fine-tuned SVs are more effective than optimization-free ones. However, current approaches to fine-tuned SVs suffer from two limitations. First, they require careful selection of steering factors on a per-SV basis to balance steering effectiveness and generation quality at inference time. Second, they operate as full-sequence SVs (FSSVs), which can sacrifice generation quality regardless of factor selection due to excessive intervention on the model generation process. To address the first limitation, we propose joint training of steering factors and directions, such that post-hoc factor selection is no longer required. Using neural network scaling theory, we find that moderately large initialization sizes and learning rates for steering factors are essential for stability and efficiency of joint training. To tackle the second limitation, we draw inspiration from representation fine-tuning and introduce Prompt-only SV (PrOSV), an SV that intervenes only on a few prompt tokens. Our empirical results show that PrOSV outperforms traditional FSSVs on AxBench when using our joint training scheme. We also find that PrOSV achieves a better tradeoff between general model utility and adversarial robustness than FSSV.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Foundations of Practical Quantum Advantage in Quantum-Informed Machine Learning for Predicting Chaos

Authors:
Maida Wang↗Xiao Xue↗Minh Chung↗Peter V. Coveney↗

arXiv:2606.13422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop theoretical foundations for a practical quantum-advantage mechanism in quantum-informed machine learning for chaotic dynamical systems. A family of k-indexed higher-order quantum statistical priors (Q-Priors) hosts the k-point marginal of the invariant measure on n_q = kq qubits, extending the single-site construction of prior work. We prove a two-stage advantage. In the representation stage, superposition and entanglement compactly store non-factorisable spatial correlations of the invariant measure on n_q qubits. In the extraction stage, joint Bell measurements on two copies estimate any post hoc Pauli functional with a copy-pair count independent of n_q, whereas any adaptive single-copy protocol for the corresponding full-Pauli read-out requires Omega(2^(n_q)) copies; this is a provable quantum-classical separation in copy-measurement complexity. The two-copy read-out is realised in simulation and on IQM superconducting processors. Two case studies instantiate the mechanism in workflows of independent scientific value: a turbulent channel-flow study in which the two-copy read-out yields a named non-diagonal correlator of the invariant measure (the velocity-direction coherence), and a medium-range weather forecasting workflow on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA5 reanalysis in which the diagonal k

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Authors:
Jos\'e Medina↗Paul Honeine↗Abdelaziz Bensrhair↗Amnir Hadachi↗

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

Authors:
Andrew S. C. Yuen↗

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Acoustic Prompting via Stage-wise Modulation for Few-Shot Learning in Audio Language Models

Authors:
Hyebin Cho↗Jaehyuk Jang↗Changick Kim↗Joon Son Chung↗

arXiv:2606.15751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have shown remarkable success in zero-shot audio classification by aligning audio waveforms with text. Recent efforts to improve downstream performance focus on learning optimal text prompts. However, previous approaches focus on the text encoder, leaving the potential of learnable prompts within the audio encoder unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that introduces trainable prompts into the audio encoder to capture task-specific acoustic features. We demonstrate that integrating audio-side prompt learning with existing text-side approaches enhances few-shot adaptation. Through extensive experiments across 11 datasets show that integrating our method as a plug-and-play module alongside existing text prompt tuning generally leads to performance improvements. These findings suggest that explicitly modulating the audio representation space effectively complements text-only prompting approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/hyebin-c/aspl.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Lakshita Dodeja↗Ondrej Biza↗Shivam Vats↗Stephen Hart↗Stefanie Tellex↗Robin Walters↗Karl Schmeckpeper↗Thomas Weng↗

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

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