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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

TENSO: Software Package for Numerically Exact Open Quantum Dynamics Based on Efficient Tree Tensor Network Decomposition of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion

arXiv:2603.17711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TENSO is a versatile and powerful open-source software package for numerically exact simulations of the dynamics of quantum systems immersed in structured thermal environments. It is based on a tree tensor network decomposition of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) that efficiently curbs its curse of dimensionality with bath complexity. As such, TENSO enables exact non-Markovian open quantum dynamics simulations even with complex environments typical of chemistry and quantum information science. TENSO allows for time-dependent drive in the system, and for non-commuting fluctuations. More generally, TENSO efficiently propagates the dynamics for any method with a generator of the dynamics that can be expressed in a sum-of-products form, including the HEOM and multi-layer multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree methods. TENSO enables simulations using tensor trees and trains of arbitrary order, and implements three propagation strategies for the coupled master equations; two fixed-rank methods that require a constant memory footprint during the dynamics and one adaptive rank method with a variable memory footprint controlled by the target level of computational error. In contrast to the accompanying theory and algorithmic paper [J. Chem. Phys. 163, 104109 (2025)] the focus here is on the practical usage and applications of TENSO with underlying theoretical concepts introduced only as needed.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Output Type Before Quality: A Standards-Derived XAI Admissibility Rubric for Autonomous-Driving Safety

arXiv:2606.05461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety standards for ML-based autonomous driving specify the kind of evidence an assurance case must contain (directed cause-and-effect chains, quantified interventional effects, named root-cause variables), yet the XAI literature is organised by output type and technique family (saliency maps, feature attribution, counterfactuals, causal graphs, language traces). SHAP, the most-recommended ADS XAI method, returns a ranked feature list that no implementation effort can convert into a directed chain (Fig.1). We name this mismatch the evidence-type gap. From AMLAS, ISO 26262, ISO21448, ISO/PAS 8800 we derive 19 testable evidentiary criteria across 7 lifecycle stages with representative clause-cited derivations and score six XAI method classes structurally. Causal XAI emerges as structurally required to satisfy the derived criteria at three stages: hazard identification (+62% rubric gap), incident investigation (+50%), and data management (+50%); the verdict set is stable across thresholds T in (0%, 50%]$ and survives a worst-case single-cell flip down to T = 25%. At the remaining four stages, correlational or language-based methods are comparable or sufficient. The rubric identifies structural admissibility (necessary but not sufficient for compliance): an admissible method's specific output content may still be wrong, and validating that fidelity (the edges a fitted SCM produces, the cause a trace names) is the open assurance challenge. A single-VLA proof of concept on 1,996 real-world driving clips (79,840 rows, ten splits) is consistent with each method's observed output type matching its rubric prediction. XAI method selection for ADS safety assurance should be driven by lifecycle-stage evidence demand, not by method popularity.

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

Vulcan: Instance-specialized, Verifiable Systems Heuristics Through LLM-driven Search

arXiv:2512.25065v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Systems resource management tasks rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics. However, growing hardware heterogeneity and workload diversity require heuristics specialized to particular deployment instances, making manual design expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we explore how to synthesize systems heuristics using LLMs. The main challenge is ensuring that generated heuristics execute safely, integrate correctly with the surrounding system, and still achieve strong performance. We propose Vulcan, a framework that identifies LLM-friendly interfaces that isolate core decision logic from the rest of the implementation. With Vulcan, LLM-generated code is restricted to simple stateless decision functions, while trusted runtime abstractions provide rich derived statistics for meaningful policy exploration without system-integration bugs. To ensure execution safety, LLMs synthesize heuristics in a restricted language, Anvil, that guarantees important properties by construction. We evaluate Vulcan across three well-studied domains and demonstrate up to 4.9x higher savings for spot-VM scheduling, up to 2x lower miss ratios for cache eviction, and up to 10% higher application performance for tiered-memory systems, while ensuring execution safety throughout.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ReproRepo: Scaling Reproducibility Audits with GitHub Repository Issues

Reproducing research results from papers and released code is central to scientific progress. Existing works have introduced benchmarks to evaluate whether LLM agents can assist with reproducibility, but they are difficult to scale due to their reliance on substantial manual effort for data curation and evaluation. We introduce ReproRepo, a scalable framework for reproducibility evaluation that leverages human-raised GitHub issues as naturally occurring supervision on realistic reproduction blockers. We instantiate ReproRepo on 1,149 recent machine learning papers from major conferences and evaluate four frontier model-agent configurations. Our results show that LLM agents, even without executing code, can identify many real-world reproducibility problems from paper-repository pairs: the best agent in our study, namely Codex with GPT-5.5, surfaces at least one semantically related human-reported blocker for ~90% of papers in the study. Further analysis shows that agents are particularly effective for surfacing visible failures and identifying the right semantic region, but may still be insufficient in exact localization. ReproRepo can serve as a reusable, scalable framework for future evaluations of LLM agents on real-world reproducibility auditing. Our code is released at https://github.com/LithiumDA/ReproRepo.

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

Bridging the Gap: Enabling Natural Language Queries for NoSQL Databases through Text-to-NoSQL Translation

arXiv:2502.11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: NoSQL databases are core data infrastructure, yet natural-language access to them remains underdeveloped: correct query generation must recover how a non-relational data model represents entities, nested paths, arrays, missing fields, and dynamic keys. This paper studies Text-to-NoSQL, translating natural-language requests into executable NoSQL queries, instantiated with MongoDB aggregation pipelines over schema-less document stores. We present TEND, short for Text-to-NoSQL Dataset, an execution-verified benchmark with 1,210 MongoDB-native tasks across 11 databases. To our knowledge, TEND is the first Text-to-NoSQL benchmark whose database worlds are MongoDB-native by design: experts manually define collection boundaries, nested arrays, optional and sparse paths, polymorphic shapes, and dynamic-key conventions; these worlds are populated with real data and verified through frozen MongoDB execution, so TEND evaluates schema-less document reasoning rather than SQL-to-MQL transfer. We further introduce SAG, a Schema-as-Data Grounding solver that induces path and value grounding from stored-document evidence before bounded MQL generation, execution-grounded repair, and result-consistency selection. Evaluation uses bounded column-tolerant execution accuracy (EXC) as the headline metric, complemented by a graded result-set F1 and a mutually exclusive execution-outcome decomposition. Experiments show that LLMs with strong NL2SQL performance degrade substantially on TEND, validating Text-to-NoSQL as a distinct schema-less document reasoning problem.

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

Learning New Tasks via Reusable Skills: Skill-Compositional Experts for Embodied Continual Learning

Embodied Continual Learning (ECL) aims to enable robots to continually acquire new manipulation tasks while retaining previously learned behaviors under closed-loop control. Compared with conventional continual learning, ECL suffers from more severe catastrophic forgetting. Feature drift accumulated under closed-loop control progressively propagates through sequential decision-making, leading to degradation of previously learned behaviors. A key challenge in ECL lies in structured skill reuse across continually evolving tasks, since existing methods primarily focus on skill learning without explicitly organizing them for coherent task execution. To address this issue, we propose SCE, a Skill-Compositional Experts framework for ECL. SCE builds a skill base via Compositional Skill Grounding (CSG), which decomposes task demonstrations into reusable skills. Based on this, Dual Execution-and-Transition Experts (DETE) enable new task learning through skill composition, where one branch ensures skill execution and the other supports transitions between skills for coherent behavior. Experiments on LIBERO benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that SCE consistently improves retention and overall task performance. Further feature drift analyses and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method. Project website: https://eqcy.github.io/sce/.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Real-space spectral functions of three-dimensional billion-size topological non-Hermitian matter with tensor networks

arXiv:2606.16424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems host a wide range of unconventional topological phenomena while large-scale simulations in finite three dimensional systems remain challenging because of the rapidly growing number of sites. In particular, higher-order topological corner modes are often studied only in small lattices, where strong finite-size effects can mask their intrinsic behavior. Here, we develop a tensor-network framework that combines quantics tensor cross interpolation with the kernel polynomial method, enabling compact representations of large non-Hermitian tight-binding Hamiltonians and direct calculations of real-space spectral functions for systems exceeding one billion lattice sites. Using this approach, we investigate three-dimensional non-Hermitian higher-order topological insulators with with structured real-space geometries. The unprecedented system size enables direct access to the macroscopic regime and allows corner-mode spectral responses to be resolved in genuinely three-dimensional systems.By tuning the loss strength, we identify distinct in-gap corner modes across weak- and strong-loss regimes.Our results establish tensor-network algorithms as a powerful strategy to perform real-space spectral calculations in exceptionally large non-Hermitian systems.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Contactless Respiratory Monitoring on Heterogeneous Mobile Robots: A Multimodal Edge-Computing Framework

Respiratory-rate (RR) monitoring is a critical component of remote triage and victim assessment in emergency response, disaster recovery, and infectious-disease scenarios, where minimizing physical contact can reduce responder risk and improve operational safety. However, field deployment of contactless RR monitoring remains challenging due to variable illumination, posture changes, platform heterogeneity, and the impracticality of wearable sensors in hazardous environments. In this paper, we present a modality-adaptive contactless RR monitoring framework for heterogeneous mobile robots with onboard edge computing. The proposed system combines brightness-adaptive sensor selection across RGB, thermal, near-infrared (NIR), and low-light cameras, keypoint-guided chest ROI extraction for posture-robust monitoring, and a signal-quality-index (SQI)-based filtering mechanism for reliable respiratory estimation. We implement and evaluate the framework on three robotic platforms spanning quadruped and wheeled locomotion and multiple edge-computing architectures. Experiments conducted across diverse lighting conditions, subject poses, and robot-to-subject distances demonstrate that the framework generalizes across platforms without per-platform algorithmic retuning, while revealing modality-specific operational boundaries. RGB provides the broadest coverage up to 8m, NIR remains effective up to 6m, thermal is reliable only at short range, and low-light sensing supports monitoring in complete darkness up to 8m. Overall, the results demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal contactless RR monitoring on mobile robots and support its use as a foundation for autonomous triage and victim assessment in hazardous search-and-rescue settings.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Too long; didn't solve

arXiv:2604.07593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

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

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

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

Solving Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning from an Auto-Annotation Perspective

Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and open-world data, existing SSFSL literature largely neglects these resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to solve real-world auto-annotation, SSFSL should leverage such open resources. To bridge this gap, we explore established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Unexpectedly, they significantly underperform FSL baselines that do not use unlabeled data. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause of failure: VLMs produce flat distributions of softmax probabilities, resulting in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose an embarrassingly simple solution that uses temperatures to sharpen the softmax output, which not only increases the confidence scores of pseudo-labels to improve the utilization of unlabeled data, but also strengthens training supervision for effective finetuning. Furthermore, we exploit task-relevant open data, e.g., those retrieved from VLMs' publicly available pretraining set. To mitigate the imbalance and domain gaps in retrieved data, we employ a stage-wise training strategy. Building on the successful finetuning of VLMs and the exploitation of open data, we present a simple yet effective SSFSL method, Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperatures (SWIFT). Across five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes a VLM assuming unlabeled data having ground-truth labels!

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

SoK: AI Secure Code Generation: Progress, Pitfalls, and Paths Forward

arXiv:2606.25195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing use of AI systems for code generation raises a central security question: what can today's models and coding agents actually do to produce secure code, where do they still fail, and what would move the field forward? Existing work has explored prompting, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and agentic workflows for secure code generation, but the field still lacks a systematic understanding of how these techniques improve security and why substantial failures persist. In this SoK, we systematize the progress, pitfalls, and paths forward for AI secure code generation. We introduce a three-level framework that measures models' natural-language understanding of secure coding principles, their code-level actuation of those principles during generation, and the knowledge–actuation gaps between the two. We instantiate this framework across models and coding agents on benchmarks covering both isolated function-level security and full web-application security. Our results show that secure-coding-principle understanding is a statistically strong predictor of code-level outcomes, including functional correctness, security, and joint functional-security correctness. Yet substantial knowledge–actuation gaps remain: models can recognize relevant security principles but still fail to translate them into secure and functional code. These findings offer a principle-centered account of where AI secure code generation stands today and identify concrete paths forward through principle-guided generation, evaluation, benchmarking, and agentic workflows.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Post Hoc Localization of Beam F3 Stimulation Targets: An MRI-Derived Geodesic Approach for Refined TMS E-Field Simulations

Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is an established treatment option in major depressive disorder. One of the most common approaches for targeting the dlPFC is the Beam F3 method, which determines the stimulation site (F3Beam) as a function of external cranial measurements. Precise knowledge of the individual stimulation site is essential for imaging-based analyses of TMS effects. However, due to the method's reliance on individual anatomy, retrospective identification of F3Beam targets across cohorts is challenging, limiting the analysis of existing datasets. We developed a scalable method to reconstruct subject-specific F3Beam target locations for e-field simulations based on structural imaging. Methods: High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) T1-weighted MRI was used to generate individual scalp meshes via the ''Simulation of Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation'' (SimNIBS) software. Subject-specific anatomical distances and coordinates of interest were measured geodesically using a Python-based script to reconstruct the individual F3Beam targets. Validation included a retrospective comparison between digital geodesic measurements and manual cranial measurements in 20 patients and a prospective comparison with MR-visible scalp markers in 2 healthy controls. To assess the impact of our targeting algorithm on e-field simulations, volumetric e-field maps based on three potential targets (F3Beam, F3MNI, F3Geo) were generated in SimNIBS and compared using voxel-wise statistics in SPM12. Results: Retrospective analysis revealed a systematic bias towards higher in vivo measurements compared to digital geodesic measurements, though deviations in the final distances determining F3Beam (xBeam and yBeam) were minimal ({Delta}xBeam: 0.11 {+/-} 0.08 cm; {Delta}yBeam: 0.14 {+/-} 0.21 cm). Prospective validation demonstrated that F3Beam coordinates better matched in vivo coil positions than group-template-derived targets (F3MNI). Group-level analysis showed method-dependent clustering of coil positions with corresponding voxel-wise e-field differences. Conclusions: Individualized geodesic measurements may enable accurate, scalable and retrospective identification of Beam F3 targets and coil orientations. This approach may yield more accurate e-field simulations than group-template based targeting and provides a practical method for retrospective analysis of existing TMS treatment cohorts. This could be leveraged to identify response predictors or imaging-based biomarkers of treatment response.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The central heat trace on large compact classical groups

arXiv:2511.08288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the large-$N$ asymptotics of the central trace of the heat kernel on compact classical groups. For every classical family $G_N\subset \mathrm{GL}_N(\C)$, we prove a full large-$N$ asymptotic expansion, using a highest weights/partitions correspondence adapted to the large-rank regime, under which the eigenvalues of the Laplace–Beltrami operator stabilize as observables in the algebra of shifted symmetric functions. Then, we prove a random surface representation of the trace in terms of ramified coverings of the torus. We provide two independent applications: an explicit large-rank counting law for the Casimir spectrum, with exponential Hardy–Ramanujan-type growth in contrast with the polynomial behavior of Weyl's law at fixed rank, and a rigorous probabilistic formulation of the Yang–Mills/Hurwitz duality on a two-dimensional torus initiated by Gross and Taylor, completing a previous work of the authors. We also extend this duality to a Yang–Mills/Gromov–Witten duality by expressing the coefficients of the central heat trace as explicit functionals of the generating function of Gromov–Witten invariants.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry Breaking through Superselection by Boundary Conditions

arXiv:2606.15272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is central to modern physics but is conventionally defined only for infinite systems, raising challenges for its interpretation in finite, real-world setups. This paper argues that the key to resolving this issue lies in the underappreciated role of boundary conditions in quantum systems. Inspired by both the relational approach to symmetries and the physical mechanism behind symmetry breaking, we formulate a relational interpretation of SSB: a finite system exhibits SSB relative to a reference environment which can induce perturbations across the boundary. This eliminates the need for the thermodynamic limit, offering a more physical picture of SSB that emphasizes the observable consequences of the interactions that real-life systems inevitably have with their environment. We show how, in this relational interpretation, SSB for both lattice systems and (gauge) field theories should be understood as subtle, rather than spontaneous, symmetry breaking, still in contrast to explicit symmetry breaking. We also explain how algebraic definitions of SSB for infinite systems relate to the intuitive picture of SSB in finite systems and illustrate how asymptotic boundary conditions push the environment "to infinity". In this way, our relational interpretation of SSB provides a unified conceptual framework applicable to symmetry-breaking in systems of any size.

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

Open-SWE-Traces: Advancing Dual-Mode Multilingual Distillation for Software Engineering Agents

arXiv:2606.16038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The path toward autonomous software engineering is currently bottlenecked by a severe deficit of diverse, large-scale trajectory data. We address this by introducing \ourdataset, an expansive dataset of 207,489 agentic trajectories spanning nine programming languages (Python, Go, TS, JS, Rust, Java, PHP, C, C++). Sourced from 20,000 real-world PRs via OpenHands and SWE-agent harnesses, the dataset utilizes a hybrid-reasoning synthesis: Minimax-M2.5 generates trajectories with explicit "thinking" processes, while Qwen3.5-122B provides high-quality "non-thinking" traces. Filtered for permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) from SWE-rebench-V2, this data facilitates the training of models capable of long-horizon reasoning. We validate the dataset by fine-tuning the Qwen3-30B-A3B series (Thinking, Instruct, and Coder). The best performing model achieves resolve rates of 61.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 36.8% on SWE-bench Pro. These results establish Open-SWE-Traces as a premier resource for distilling human-level software engineering capabilities into efficient, open-source agentic LLMs.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Abstraction in Style: Beyond Texture and Color

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Anomalous weak values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer extracted directly from intensity measurements

arXiv:2606.24798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak values provide a powerful framework for characterizing quantum systems. Their experimental extraction conventionally relies on weak conditioned von Neumann measurements, involving weak interactions and meter states that increase experimental complexity and often limit measurement efficiency. Here we introduce a method to fully characterize path weak-values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing neither meter states nor weak interactions. We experimentally demonstrate the technique in matter-wave interferometry. We identify anomalous weak values and, equivalently, negative quasiprobability distributions, which reflect the nonclassical behavior of the quantum system. The approach relies uniquely on intensity measurements at the output ports of the interferometer combined with controlled relative phase shifts between the paths. The absence of meter states enables considerable simplification of the setup and shorter measurement times, while preserving full access to weak values with comparable or increased accuracy. The scheme is directly applicable to a broad class of experiments involving two-level quantum systems.

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

Attosecond Path Qubits in High-Harmonic Generation: Classical Dephasing and Trace-Out Decoherence

arXiv:2606.20372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-harmonic generation (HHG) is governed by interference between electron trajectories. We propose that the dominant short and long trajectories define an experimentally addressable two-level subsystem: an attosecond path qubit (APQ). We formulate a trajectory-resolved density matrix to identify two distinct coherence-loss mechanisms: classical dephasing from ensemble averaging and quantum decoherence arising from the trace-out of unobserved degrees of freedom. By investigating shot-to-shot fluctuations and unresolved transverse momentum, we demonstrate that while dephasing suppresses coherence through averaging, the ``trace-out'' channel produces mixed states even for fixed driving parameters. We explore how these mechanisms modify APQ purity and show that mode selection and conditioning provide operational routes to isolate them. These results establish a reduced-state framework for diagnosing coherence loss in HHG and for engineering trajectory-based quantum states in attosecond interferometry.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SafeLLM: Extraction as a Hallucination-Resistant Alternative to Rewriting in Safety-Critical Settings

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to access organisational documentation, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), HR policies and institutional guidelines. However, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that rely on free-form rewriting can introduce hallucinations and unstable trade-offs between completeness and conciseness, particularly in safety- and compliance-critical settings. Objectives: To evaluate extraction as a hallucination-resistant alternative to rewriting-based RAG and compare strategies that balance precision, recall and safety across document types and model scales. Methods: We compare multiple prompting strategies, including line-number-based source selection, extraction of relevant guideline sentences with explicit safety annotations, and a multi-stage pipeline that refines draft answers using supporting evidence from source guidelines. Experiments are conducted on documents of varying length and structure, including local NHS acute care and oncology guidelines and UK-wide NICE guidelines, using both frontier-scale and locally deployable models. Performance is assessed using automatic metrics and human expert evaluation of relevance and completeness. Results: Line-number selection achieves the strongest results, outperforming direct copying and safety-focused strategies across both large and small models while maintaining high term recall (up to 95%) and close alignment with source text. Safety-oriented approaches improve precision but introduce systematic omissions, while multi-stage filtering further amplifies this trade-off. Performance varies with document structure: line-based extraction excels in protocol-like content, whereas alternative strategies perform better on more verbose documents (up to 97% term recall).