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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

Authors:
Frederik vom Ende↗

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP

Authors:
Aniket Pramanick↗Yufang Hou↗Saif M. Mohammad↗Iryna Gurevych↗

Scientific papers advance $claims$ that later work supports, extends, or sometimes refutes. Yet existing methods for citation and claim analysis capture only fragments of this dialogue. In this work, we make these interactions explicit at the level of individual scientific claims. We introduce $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, a claim-centric view of the NLP literature, built from $1{,}617$ ACL Anthology papers $(1979 - 2025)$ that are manually annotated with $5{,}689$ claims and $4{,}871$ cross-paper claim relations, indicating whether a citing paper $\texttt{supports}$, $\texttt{extends}$, $\texttt{qualifies}$, $\texttt{refutes}$, or references a cited claim as $\texttt{background}$. Building on $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, we define a new task – $Claim Relation Classification$ – which requires models to infer the scientific stance toward a cited claim from the text and citation context. Evaluating neural models and large language models on this task, we report baseline performance of $0.81$ macro-F1, suggesting that the task is tractable while leaving room for improvement. We then scale this framework to $\sim$$13k$ NLP papers to study claim evolution across decades of NLP research. We show that $63.5\%$ claims are never reused; only $11.1\%$ are ever challenged. Widely propagated claims are more often $reshaped$ through qualification and extension than supported or refuted. Overall, $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$ offers a lens for examining how ideas shift and mature within NLP.

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Primary care practitioners preconception health literacy and information-seeking: A cross-sectional survey.

Authors:
Caut↗Schoenaker↗McIntyre↗Steel↗

Background Parental health before pregnancy influences maternal and child outcomes. Primary care professionals, including general practitioners [GPs], midwives, and naturopaths, can provide preconception care, yet many report limited knowledge and difficulty accessing relevant information. This study described Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths preconception health literacy, including knowledge and ability to access information. Methods Between July and September 2022, Australian GPs, midwives, and naturopaths completed a 32-item online cross-sectional survey. Participants were recruited through professional associations, and data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics Results Participants (N=373) included naturopaths (40.7%), GPs (32.4%), and midwives (26.8%). Reported barriers to clinician health literacy including lack of preconception care resources (25.5%), and limited clinician knowledge (23.6%). The proportion identifying limited clinician knowledge differed significantly between professions (GP: 31.4%; midwives: 23.0%; naturopaths: 17.8%; p=0.030). The highest level of accurate knowledge regarding preconception exposures was for pre-pregnancy obesity (82.7%), while low birth weight was the most accurately identified preconception outcomes (83.7%). Incorrect responses were most common for maternal multivitamin use as an exposure (28.3%) and childhood leukaemia as an outcome (26.3%). Differences between professions were strongest for infant outcomes, with moderate associations observed for shoulder dystocia (V=.2355), precipitous labour (V=.2173), macrosomia (V=.2060), labour dystocia (V=.2018) and cryptorchidism (V=.2018). Discussion Preconception health literacy varies across primary care professions. Clinicians require greater access to targeted resources and education tailored to their differing scopes of practice and experience. Improving clinician preconception health literacy may strengthen consistent evidence-based care and support better maternal, child, and long-term family health outcomes.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

Authors:
Yi Yu↗Xinchuan Qiu↗

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Authors:
Yuchen Xian↗Yang He↗Yunqiu Xu↗Yi Yang↗

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

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

TRACER: Training-Free Closed-Loop Structured Inference for Traffic Accident Reconstruction

Authors:
Yanchen Guan↗Chengyue Wang↗Bin Rao↗Haicheng Liao↗Jiaxun Zhang↗Shang Gao↗Chengzhong Xu↗Zhenning Li↗

arXiv:2606.25002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traffic accident reconstruction is a forensic inverse problem that requires recovering physically consistent motion from sparse and heterogeneous evidence. Existing learning-based approaches predominantly optimize for semantic plausibility or visual realism, rather than quantitative agreement with measurable geometry and dynamics. Here, we present TRACER, a training-free framework that formulates reconstruction as a closed-loop structured inference process. Instead of directly generating dense trajectories, our framework constructs and iteratively refines event-anchored motion hypotheses under geometric, kinematic, and interaction constraints, guided by structured case memory and consistency-driven diagnosis. This design enables incremental, interpretable corrections when evidence is insufficient, making the accident reconstruction process more aligned with the workflow of human experts. Experiments on real-world accident data show that TRACER achieves improved geometric fidelity, velocity consistency, and collision accuracy over both data-driven and physics-based baselines.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

Authors:
Jingru Guo↗Xiangyuan Xue↗Lian Zhang↗Wanghan Xu↗Siki Chen↗Philip Torr↗Wanli Ouyang↗Lei Bai↗Zhenfei Yin↗

Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists' First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Observation of Non-Gaussian Magnon Dynamics in a Two-Dimensional Long-Range XY Model

Authors:
S. -A. Guo↗J. -Y. Tan↗J. Ye↗Y. Jiang↗L. Zhang↗Y. -X. Chen↗H. -J. Chen↗H. -Y. Hu↗W. -X. Guo↗B. -X. Qi↗L. He↗Z. -C. Zhou↗…

arXiv:2606.13499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian evolution of high-order spin correlations characterizes important properties of quantum many-body systems. In practice, decoherence, statistical fluctuation and miscalibration of experimental parameters all hinder the witness of non-Gaussian dynamics. Here we demonstrate the crossover between Gaussian and non-Gaussian dynamics on a two-dimensional XY model with long-range and spatially structured interaction using a trapped ion quantum simulator. We prepare different initial densities of magnon excitations and verify the dynamics of single-spin observables for the engineered Hamiltonian. Then we compare the high-order spin correlations with the mean-field solution and the Holstein-Primakoff approximation, and demonstrate the non-Gaussian behavior in a way independent of the calibration errors. Our work provides a verifiable path from classically simulatable dynamics to regimes where quantum advantage may emerge.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Unified Framework for Efficient Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering: Adapting Dual, Hybrid, and Encoder-Decoder Architectures

Authors:
Timothy Agboada↗Shikha Chandel↗Yadav Raj Ghimire↗Leila Hashemi-Beni↗

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the Remote Sensing (RS) domain presents unique challenges due to the high resolution, multi scale object distribution, and semantic complexity of aerial imagery. While general domain Foundation Models have achieved remarkable success, their direct application to RSVQA is hindered by massive domain shifts and the computationally prohibitive nature of full fine tuning. This study presents a comparative analysis of RS Adapter, a Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) strategy, applied across three distinct Vision Language Model (VLM) architectures: the Dual Encoder CLIP, the Encoder Decoder BLIP, and the Hybrid FLAVA. We introduce a unified architectural surgery pipeline that injects lightweight bottleneck adapters into the attention and MLP layers of frozen backbones, enabling rapid adaptation with less than 5 percent of trainable parameters. Experimental results on the high resolution RSVQA x dataset demonstrate that while all adapted models achieve convergence, the Hybrid FLAVA architecture offers a superior balance of multimodal reasoning and retrieval capabilities compared to its unimodal counterparts. Our findings establish a new baseline for resource efficient VQA in disaster assessment and urban monitoring.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Softmax as Linear Attention in the Large-Prompt Regime: a Measure-based Perspective

Authors:
Etienne Boursier↗Claire Boyer↗

arXiv:2512.11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax attention under both finite and infinite prompts. For i.i.d. Gaussian inputs, we lean on the fact that the softmax operator converges in the infinite-prompt limit to a linear operator acting on the underlying input-token measure. Building on this insight, we establish non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the output and gradient of softmax attention, quantifying how rapidly the finite-prompt model approaches its infinite-prompt counterpart, and prove that this concentration remains stable along the entire training trajectory in general in-context learning settings with sub-Gaussian tokens. In the case of in-context linear regression, we use the tractable infinite-prompt dynamics to analyze training at finite prompt length. Our results allow optimization analyses developed for linear attention to transfer directly to softmax attention when prompts are sufficiently long, showing that large-prompt softmax attention inherits the analytical structure of its linear counterpart. This, in turn, provides a principled and broadly applicable toolkit for studying the training dynamics and statistical behavior of softmax attention layers in large prompt regimes.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

Authors:
Jiangze Han↗Vineet Goyal↗Will Ma↗

arXiv:2606.19607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

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

Authors:
Tian Liu↗Anwesha Basu↗James Caverlee↗Shu Kong↗

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!

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

Colab NAS: Obtaining lightweight task-specific convolutional neural networks following Occam's razor

Authors:
Andrea Mattia Garavagno↗Daniele Leonardis↗Antonio Frisoli↗

The current trend of applying transfer learning from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem, with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present ColabNAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset, a standard TinyML benchmark, in just 3.1 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Feature-Space Planes Searcher: A Universal Domain Adaptation Framework for Interpretability and Computational Efficiency

Authors:
Zhitong Cheng↗Yiran Jiang↗Yulong Ge↗Yufeng Li↗Zhongheng Qin↗Rongzhi Lin↗Jianwei Ma↗

Domain shift, characterized by degraded model performance during transition from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains, poses a persistent challenge for deploying deep learning systems. Current unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods predominantly rely on fine-tuning feature extractors - an approach limited by inefficiency, reduced interpretability, and poor scalability to modern architectures. Our analysis reveals that models pretrained on large-scale data exhibit domain-invariant geometric patterns in their feature space, characterized by intra-class clustering and inter-class separation, thereby preserving transferable discriminative structures. These findings indicate that domain shifts primarily manifest as boundary misalignment rather than feature degradation. Unlike fine-tuning entire pre-trained models - which risks introducing unpredictable feature distortions - we propose the Feature-space Planes Searcher (FPS): a novel domain adaptation framework that optimizes decision boundaries by leveraging these geometric patterns while keeping the feature encoder frozen. This streamlined approach enables interpretative analysis of adaptation while substantially reducing memory and computational costs through offline feature extraction, permitting full-dataset optimization in a single computation cycle. Evaluations on public benchmarks demonstrate that FPS achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods. FPS scales efficiently with multimodal large models and shows versatility across diverse domains including protein structure prediction, remote sensing classification, and earthquake detection. We anticipate FPS will provide a simple, effective, and generalizable paradigm for transfer learning, particularly in domain adaptation tasks. .

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

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

Authors:
Aaron Sander↗Simon Cichy↗Martin Eigel↗Jens Eisert↗Maximilian Fr\"ohlich↗Tom Peham↗Robert Wille↗

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Authors:
Wenbo Yu↗Bohua Wang↗Hao Fang↗Kuofeng Gao↗Jingru Zeng↗Xiaochen Yang↗Tianyi Zhang↗Xiaoxiao Ma↗Jiawei Kong↗Hao Wu↗Bin Chen↗Shu-Tao Xia↗…

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

When Researchers Say Mental Model/Theory of Mind of AI, What Are They Really Talking About?

Authors:
Xiaoyun Yin↗Elmira Zahmat Doost↗Shiwen Zhou↗Garima Arya Yadav↗Jamie C. Gorman↗

arXiv:2510.02660v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When researchers claim AI systems possess ToM or mental models, they are fundamentally discussing behavioral predictions and bias corrections rather than genuine mental states. This position paper argues that the current discourse conflates sophisticated pattern matching with authentic cognition, missing a crucial distinction between simulation and experience. While recent studies show LLMs achieving human-level performance on ToM laboratory tasks, these results are based only on behavioral mimicry. More importantly, the entire testing paradigm may be flawed in applying individual human cognitive tests to AI systems, but assessing human cognition directly in the moment of human-AI interaction. I suggest shifting focus toward mutual ToM frameworks that acknowledge the simultaneous contributions of human cognition and AI algorithms, emphasizing the interaction dynamics, instead of testing AI in isolation.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Authors:
Ziqing Qiao↗Yinuo Xu↗Chaojun Xiao↗Zhou Su↗Zihan Zhou↗Yingfa Chen↗Xiaoyue Xu↗Xu Han↗Zhiyuan Liu↗

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

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

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

Authors:
Yuqi Jiang↗Yuqi Zhang↗Zhiding Liang↗Qiang Guan↗Yan Li↗Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy↗

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

Authors:
Yuho Lee↗Jisu Shin↗Nicole Hee-Yeon Kim↗Jihwan Bang↗Juntae Lee↗Kyuwoong Hwang↗Fatih Porikli↗Hwanjun Song↗

arXiv:2606.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of $\langle$query, evidence chunk, answer$\rangle$ triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Temporal Straightening for Latent Planning

Authors:
Ying Wang↗Oumayma Bounou↗Gaoyue Zhou↗Randall Balestriero↗Tim G. J. Rudner↗Yann LeCun↗Mengye Ren↗

arXiv:2603.12231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning good representations is essential for latent planning with world models. While pretrained visual encoders produce strong semantic visual features, they are not tailored to planning and contain information irrelevant – or even detrimental – to planning. Inspired by the perceptual straightening hypothesis in human visual processing, we introduce temporal straightening to improve representation learning for latent planning. Using a curvature regularizer that encourages locally straightened latent trajectories, we jointly learn an encoder and a predictor of a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model. We show that reducing curvature this way makes the Euclidean distance in latent space a better proxy for the geodesic distance and improves the conditioning of the planning objective. We demonstrate empirically that temporal straightening makes gradient-based planning more stable and yields significantly higher success rates across a suite of goal-reaching tasks. Our code is available at https://agenticlearning.ai/temporal-straightening.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction

Authors:
Haoliang Liu↗Chengkun Cai↗Xu Zhao↗Han Zhu↗Shizhou Huang↗Xinglin Zhang↗Tao Chen↗Jenq-Neng Hwang↗Zhang Huaping↗Lei Li↗

Existing information extraction (IE) tasks increasingly adopt in-context learning (ICL) with large language models. However, current approaches either show inconsistent performance across model scales or lack systematic optimization and generalizability. Building on this, we propose BCL (Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction), the first optimization framework that uses particle filtering with Bayesian updates to systematically refine label representations across IE tasks. Through four steps initialization, observation, weight update, and resampling, BCL generalizes to both sequence labeling and relation classification paradigms. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial and consistent improvements over existing approaches.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Learning Optimization Proxies for Sequential Contextual Stochastic Programs: An Order Fulfillment Application

Authors:
Tinghan Ye↗Shuaicheng Tong↗Changkun Guan↗Beste Basciftci↗Pascal Van Hentenryck↗

arXiv:2606.25362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential contextual stochastic programs model real-time decision systems in which each time epoch commits to an action under uncertainty whose consequences propagate into future decisions. In many practical contexts, these programs require obtaining solutions rapidly as new information becomes available. These problems can be represented through scenario approximations to be solved by off-the-shelf optimization solvers, which achieve high decision quality offline but typically run in seconds to minutes per instance, falling short of the sub-second responses that peak periods of planning require. This paper develops a learning-based optimization proxy: a scenario-embedded neural network trained offline on solver-generated labels, paired online with a decoder that enforces feasibility, replacing the per-epoch solve with a single forward pass. The framework is specialized to omnichannel order fulfillment, where each arriving order requires a sub-second assignment of products to distribution centers and carrier services under stochastic delivery times and future demand. A two-stage contextual stochastic program is introduced to formulate this problem, and its contextual sample average approximation (C-SAA) supplies the offline labels, while a composite training loss combines label imitation, a constraint-violation penalty, and self-supervised cost alignment. In a calibrated simulator built from JD.com transactional records, a detailed computational study is provided. The proxy reduces decision latency by roughly 2800x relative to the online finite-sample C-SAA reference and improves over it by 3.3% in realized fulfillment cost. Relative to established fulfillment policies, the proxy lowers total realized cost by at least 10.7% and roughly halves the late-delivery rate.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

SFL-MTSC: Leveraging Semantic Frame-Level Multi-Task Self-Consistency for Robust Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding

Authors:
Po-Yen Chen↗Berlin Chen↗

Prompt-based spoken language understanding (SLU) with large language models (LLMs) often suffers from inconsistent intent–slot structures due to decoding stochasticity, particularly in multi-intent scenarios. In view of this, we propose Semantic Frame-Level Multi-Task Self-Consistency (SFL-MTSC), a novel structured aggregation framework operating at the semantic frame level. Instead of output-level majority voting, SFL-MTSC decomposes predictions into intent-specific frames, applies domain–intent grouping and slot-level clustering, and evaluates cluster reliability using path support scoring. Reliable frames are retained and re-integrated to form the final prediction. Zero-shot experiments on the MAC-SLU benchmark dataset show improved slot F1 and overall accuracy over single-path inference, while intent accuracy remains largely stable across most settings.

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

MedLayBench-V: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Expert-Lay Semantic Alignment in Medical Vision Language Models

Authors:
Han Jang↗Junhyeok Lee↗Heeseong Eum↗Kyu Sung Choi↗

Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) have achieved expert-level proficiency in interpreting diagnostic imaging. However, current models are predominantly trained on professional literature, limiting their ability to communicate findings in the lay register required for patient-centered care. While text-centric research has actively developed resources for simplifying medical jargon, there is a critical absence of large-scale multimodal benchmarks designed to facilitate lay-accessible medical image understanding. To bridge this resource gap, we introduce MedLayBench-V, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dedicated to expert-lay semantic alignment. Unlike naive simplification approaches that risk hallucination, our dataset is constructed via a Structured Concept-Grounded Refinement (SCGR) pipeline. This method enforces strict semantic equivalence by integrating Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) with micro-level entity constraints. MedLayBench-V provides a verified foundation for training and evaluating next-generation Med-VLMs capable of bridging the communication divide between clinical experts and patients.

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