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

A quantum implementation of high-order power method for estimating geometric entanglement of pure states

arXiv:2405.19134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement is one of the fundamental properties of a quantum state and is a crucial differentiator between classical and quantum computation. There are many ways to define entanglement and its measure, depending on the problem or application under consideration. Each of these measures may be computed or approximated by multiple methods. However, hardly any of these methods can be run on near-term quantum hardware. This work presents a quantum adaptation of the iterative high-order power method for estimating the geometric measure of entanglement of multi-qubit pure states using rank-1 tensor approximation. This method is executable on early fault-tolerant (hybrid) quantum hardware and does not depend on quantum memory. We simulate this algorithm and mitigate the effects of noise on the results of the computation using a theoretical model based on a known mitigation approach, which assumes a global depolarising noise channel.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Preparation of Fractional Quantum Hall States on Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.16548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The realization of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, characterized by fractional charge and intrinsic topological order, on quantum computers represents a central challenge at the interface of condensed matter physics and quantum information science. Current methods are grouped into two types: methods based on (quasi-)adiabatic evolution of complex parent Hamiltonians to yield target states, and circuit-based approaches for direct state preparation, which are confined to effectively one-dimensional systems near the thin cylinder or torus limit. We introduce a complementary scheme relying on direct quantum circuit construction, which works for arbitrary geometries. Specifically, we present a method to precisely prepare the $\nu=1/3$ Laughlin state on the sphere geometry and demonstrate that it significantly reduces the required number of two-qubit gates and circuit depth, compared to variational quantum circuit approaches. In addition, we employ optimal control techniques to design control pulses for both superconducting and Rydberg atom platforms, identifying experimentally feasible protocols for state preparation. Our results provide an efficient and hardware-relevant pathway for realizing generic FQH states on both noisy intermediate-scale and fault-tolerant quantum devices.

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

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Partial Ring Scan: Revisiting Scan Order in Vision State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as efficient alternatives to attention for vision tasks, offering lineartime sequence processing with competitive accuracy. Vision SSMs, however, require serializing 2D images into 1D token sequences along a predefined scan order, a factor often overlooked. We show that scan order critically affects performance by altering spatial adjacency, fracturing object continuity, and amplifying degradation under geometric transformations such as rotation. We present Partial RIng Scan Mamba (PRISMamba), a rotation-robust traversal that partitions an image into concentric rings, performs order-agnostic aggregation within each ring, and propagates context across rings through a set of short radial SSMs. Efficiency is further improved via partial channel filtering, which routes only the most informative channels through the recurrent ring pathway while keeping the rest on a lightweight residual branch. On ImageNet-1K, PRISMamba achieves 84.5% Top-1 with 3.9G FLOPs and 3,054 img/s on A100, outperforming VMamba in both accuracy and throughput while requiring fewer FLOPs. It also maintains performance under rotation, whereas fixed-path scans drop by 1~2%. These results highlight scan-order design, together with channel filtering, as a crucial, underexplored factor for accuracy, efficiency, and rotation robustness in Vision SSMs. Code will be released upon acceptance.

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

MAMVI: 3D Test-Time Adaptation via Masked Multi-View Point Clouds

3D point cloud models suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts caused by sensor noise, occlusions, and environmental changes. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a practical paradigm for mitigating this issue during inference. Recently, leveraging multi-view augmentation has shown promise in improving 3D TTA performance. However, existing multi-view approaches are often constrained by sequential optimization that treats each view independently. This sequential optimization leads to substantial inference latency due to repetitive optimization steps, making real-time adaptation impractical. To address this, we propose Masked Multi-View Test-Time Adaptation (MAMVI), which replaces sequential optimization with a unified single-step adaptation. Specifically, MAMVI utilizes a hybrid masking strategy that combines fixed ratios for stability with Beta-distributed sampling for diversity. By aggregating losses across multiple views, MAMVI performs adaptation through a single backward pass based on multi-view consensus. Additionally, a confidence-based adaptive learning rate is used to dynamically adjust the adaptation intensity for each sample. Extensive experiments on ModelNet-40C, ShapeNet-C, and ScanObjectNN-C demonstrate that MAMVI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ShapeNet-C and ScanObjectNN-C. Moreover, it remains competitive on ModelNet-40C while delivering 4.9-8.9 times faster inference, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Inseok-kong/MAMVI

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

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

Disagreement-Based Cross-Model Routing for Implicit Video Question Answering

We study multiple-choice video question answering on the ImplicitQA benchmark, where the correct answer is never explicitly shown but must be inferred from off-screen events, line-of-sight cues, causal structure, and cross-shot spatial layout. On this benchmark a single frontier video LLM already operates near its accuracy ceiling, and we observe that conventional self-consistency strategies – majority voting across repeated samples of the same model – can hurt rather than help, because the model's errors on hard questions are correlated. We propose disagreement-based cross-model routing, a pure inference-time procedure that requires no labels and no training. We triple-sample a native-video model (Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) at temperature zero, exploit the genuine sample-to-sample variance of its video-processing pipeline to identify the roughly 20% subset of questions where the three samples disagree, and route only that subset to a second model from a different family (Claude Opus 4.8) that consumes uniformly sampled frames with adaptive thinking. On the 1001-question validation set with public ground truth – our main evaluation – the method improves AvgAcc by +1.43 over the best single sample of the primary model, with per-category gains concentrated on Motion & Trajectory (+5.49), Inferred Counting (+3.45), and Vertical Spatial Reasoning (+1.82) – the categories most dependent on cross-shot reference resolution. The same pipeline applied to the held-out 172-question CVPR 2026 ImplicitQA challenge test set achieves 82.03 AvgAcc / 79.71 MacroAvgAcc (+1.81 over the best single sample of the primary model), confirming the validation result on an independent split.

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

Smoothness Errors in Dynamics Models and How to Avoid Them

arXiv:2602.05352v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern neural networks have shown promise for solving partial differential equations over surfaces, often by discretizing the surface as a mesh and learning with a mesh-aware graph neural network. However, graph neural networks suffer from oversmoothing, where a node's features become increasingly similar to those of its neighbors. Unitary graph convolutions, which are mathematically constrained to preserve smoothness, have been proposed to address this issue. Despite this, in many physical systems, such as diffusion processes, smoothness naturally increases and unitarity may be overconstraining. In this paper, we systematically study the smoothing effects of different GNNs for dynamics modeling and prove that unitary convolutions hurt performance for such tasks. We propose relaxed unitary convolutions that balance smoothness preservation with the natural smoothing required for physical systems. We also generalize unitary and relaxed unitary convolutions from graphs to meshes. In experiments on PDEs such as the heat and wave equations over complex meshes and on weather forecasting, we find that our method outperforms several strong baselines, including mesh-aware transformers and equivariant neural networks.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tensor Methods: A Unified and Interpretable Approach for Material Design

arXiv:2602.10392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When designing new materials, it is often necessary to tailor the material design to have some desired properties. As the set of design parameters grow, the search space grows exponentially, making the actual synthesis and evaluation of all material combinations virtually impossible. Even using traditional computational methods such as Finite Element Analysis becomes too computationally heavy to search the design space. Recent methods use machine learning (ML) surrogate models to more efficiently determine optimal material designs; unfortunately, these methods often (i) are notoriously difficult to interpret and (ii) under perform when the training data comes from a non-uniform sampling of the design space. We suggest the use of tensor completion methods as an all-in-one approach for interpretability and predictions. We observe classical tensor methods are able to compete with traditional ML in predictions, with the added benefit of their interpretable tensor factors (which are given completely for free, as a result of the prediction). In our experiments, we are able to rediscover physical phenomena via the tensor factors, indicating that our predictions are aligned with the true underlying physics of the problem. This also means these tensor factors could be used by experimentalists to identify potentially novel patterns, given we are able to rediscover existing ones. We also study the effects of both types of surrogate models when we encounter training data from a non-uniform sampling of the design space. We observe more specialized tensor methods that can give better generalization in these non-uniforms sampling scenarios. We find the best generalization comes from a tensor model, which is able to improve upon the baseline ML methods by up to 5% on aggregate $R^2$, and halve the error in some out of distribution regions.

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

Entity Binding Failures in Speech LLM Reasoning: Diagnosis and Chain-of-Thought Intervention

Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) underperform their text counterparts on complex reasoning. We reveal that this gap is not a uniform cognitive deficit. Evaluating two architecturally diverse SLLMs, we show speech-to-text (S2T) matches or exceeds text-to-text (T2T) on spatial, syntactic, and factual tasks. Yet on logical tasks requiring entity tracking, S2T accuracy collapses to chance. We diagnose this as an entity binding failure: continuous speech features blur precise entity-property associations during implicit reasoning. To validate this diagnosis, we introduce Entity-Aware Chain-of-Thought (EA-CoT), a lightweight inference-time intervention forcing SLLMs to enumerate entities and bind them to claims before reasoning. EA-CoT bridges the gap, even when spoken names are misrecognized, yielding up to a 24.4 percentage-point accuracy gain. Ablations confirm the gains stem from explicit semantic binding, reframing the gap as an elicitation failure rather than a missing capability.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

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

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

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

CT-VDETR: Semi-supervised 3D Trauma Detection in Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Dense Vertex Relative Position Encoding

Accurate detection and localization of traumatic injuries in abdominal CT remain challenging because voxel-level annotations are limited and expensive to obtain. We present a label-efficient framework for 3D abdominal trauma detection that combines self-supervised pretraining with semi-supervised transformer-based detection. First, we use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) on 1098 CT volumes to pretrain a 3D U-Net encoder for anatomical representation learning. Next, we adapt V-DETR to dense volumetric CT through a feature adapter that converts the encoder feature grid into a compact token sequence for transformer decoding. The pretrained encoder is then integrated with V-DETR and 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3D V-RPE) to improve the localization of irregularly shaped injuries. Finally, semi-supervised teacher-student consistency regularization leverages 2,000 additional unlabeled volumes during detector training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a 3D DETR-style detector to the RSNA abdominal trauma detection task. On this benchmark, the proposed method achieves 31.33% test mAP@0.50 using only 78 labeled training volumes, corresponding to a 1.53x improvement over supervised-only training. These results show that combining medical-domain pretraining with semi-supervised learning is an effective strategy for label-scarce 3D medical detection.

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

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Fine-Grained Aerial Object Detection

Fine-grained aerial object detection, driven by the intrinsic granularity of real-world object categories, is crucial for advanced scene understanding in remote sensing. Existing methods largely inherit the paradigm of coarse-grained object detection, relying solely on single-label supervision and thus struggling to distinguish model-level categories with subtle structural differences. However, for each specific model (e.g., Boeing 787), structured prior knowledge such as attributes and hierarchies offers discriminative semantics across multiple granularities. Motivated by this, we present ExpertDet, a scheme that incorporates expert-informed cues to enhance fine-grained aerial object detection. Specifically, we design Vision-aware Masked Attribute Modeling (VMAM), which aligns attribute semantics with visual structures by reconstructing randomly masked attributes from visual cues, enabling the detector to capture subtle structural distinctions. We further propose Hierarchical Visual Instance Promotion (HierVIP), which builds a visual prototype tree based on hierarchical relations and imposes taxonomy-aware constraints to preserve cross-level semantic continuity while enhancing category discrimination. Moreover, we curate a new fine-grained object detection benchmark for Precise recognition of model-specific Ships and Planes from aerial imagery, PSP, covering 106 ship classes and 30 airplane models, respectively, featuring the most extensive collection of model-specific categories among existing aerial object detection datasets to date. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on the PSP benchmark. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ExpertDet consistently outperforms other fine-grained competitors across hierarchy levels. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://nnnnerd.github.io/PSP-Benchmark/.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore

In an iconic experiment in 1924, Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann established that the dorsal blastopore lip of amphibian embryos functions as an organizer and induces a secondary body axis when transplanted into a host embryo1. This discovery demonstrated that specific embryonic regions can regulate embryonic patterning and lead to the establishment of an entire body axis. Subsequent studies have revealed that cnidarians, the sister group to Bilateria, also possess a blastoporal embryonic organizer2,3. However, the evolutionary origin of the organizer remains unclear. Here we report that the blastopore lip of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans4,5, exhibits organizer activity. We show that transplanted fragments of blastopore lip tissue from M. leidyi gastrula induce secondary pharynx and mouth formation. Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. Organizer function in M. leidyi requires both β-catenin and TGFβ signalling, and the TGFβ-family ligands probably provide this inductive capacity. These findings reveal the deep homology of the blastoporal organizer in ctenophores, cnidarians and vertebrates, implying the ancestral organizer role of the blastopore lip. We propose that the emergence of the organizer was an essential innovation that facilitated the change from the temporal cell differentiation of unicellular relatives to the spatial cell differentiation of the first multicellular embryo. Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Ultrastrongly coupled open systems and fine grained time

arXiv:2606.16634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of a d-level quantum system coupled to a bosonic reservoir when the coupling constant is large. It is known that in the limit of infinite coupling strength, the system undergoes an instantaneous nonselective measurement, resulting in the immediate decoherence in the measurement basis, followed by a unitary Zeno dynamics. Here we resolve this dynamical process by introducing a fine grained scaling regime of short times proportional to the inverse coupling. We provide a rigorous derivation of the open system dynamics in this regime of ultrastrong coupling and demonstrate how decoherence unfolds continuously in the new time scale. We show that Markovian dynamics which are not given by semigroups arise naturally, in contrast to what happens in the weak coupling theory.

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

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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

A biological vision inspired framework for machine perception of abutting grating illusory contours

Higher levels of machine intelligence demand alignment with human perception and cognition. Deep neural networks (DNN) dominated machine intelligence have demonstrated exceptional performance across various real-world tasks. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that DNNs fail to perceive illusory contours like the abutting grating, a discrepancy that misaligns with human perception patterns. Departing from previous works, we propose a novel deep network called illusory contour perception network (ICPNet) inspired by the circuits of the visual cortex. In ICPNet, a multi-scale feature projection (MFP) module is designed to extract multi-scale representations. To boost the interaction between feedforward and feedback features, a feature interaction attention module (FIAM) is introduced. Moreover, drawing inspiration from the shape bias observed in human perception, an edge detection task conducted via the edge fusion module (EFM) injects shape constraints that guide the network to concentrate on the foreground. We assess our method on the existing AG-MNIST test set and the AG-Fashion-MNIST test sets constructed by this work. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that ICPNet is significantly more sensitive to abutting grating illusory contours than state-of-the-art models, with notable improvements in top-1 accuracy across various subsets. This work is expected to make a step towards human-level intelligence for DNN-based models.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.