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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

M^2C-EvDet: Multi-Domain Multi-Order Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Event-based Object Detection

Event-based object Detection (EvDet), as a biologically inspired visual perception paradigm, demonstrates superior performance in scenarios demanding high temporal resolution and a wide dynamic range. Nevertheless, the inherent sparse representations and inadequate visual semantics of event data result in a considerable performance disparity between EvDet and frame-based object detection. Previous works attempt to alleviate this cross-modal discrepancy through knowledge distillation, yet they only focus on spatial visual semantics or pair-wise relational information, thus limiting performance in more complex scenarios. To address this challenge, this paper proposes M^2C-EvDet, a Multi-domain and Multi-order Cross-modal knowledge distillation framework for EvDet. Built upon frequency learning and hypergraph computation, M^2C-EvDet integrates two specialized modules: Adaptive Frequency-Decoupled Feature Distillation (AF^2D^2) and Multi-Order Relational Distillation (MORD).

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Using visual biofeedback to reduce step length error at fast walking speeds is feasible after stroke

Background and Purpose: Walking after stroke is often characterized by persistent biomechanical impairments and reduced walking capacity. While visual biofeedback can improve gait mechanics and fast walking can enhance capacity, it is unclear whether individuals post-stroke can effectively use biofeedback at higher walking speeds to address both deficits simultaneously. This study examined the effects of walking speed on the ability of participants with chronic stroke to reduce step length (SL) errors using visual biofeedback. Methods: Sixteen individuals with chronic stroke walked on a treadmill at slow, self-selected, and fast speeds with and without visual SL biofeedback. Absolute SL error relative to individualized targets was calculated for paretic and non-paretic limbs. Linear mixed-effects models with piecewise linear splines assessed the effects of speed, limb, and feedback condition. Post hoc comparisons were performed for significant interactions. Results: At lower speeds, increasing speed reduced SL error in both limbs (p < 0.001). At higher speeds, the effects of speed were dependent on limb and condition (p < 0.001). Paretic SL error increased with speed without feedback but remained stable with feedback (p < 0.001). Non-paretic SL error decreased with speed regardless of condition. SL error was greater in the paretic limb overall (p < 0.001). Discussion and Conclusions: Fast walking alone did not reduce paretic SL errors. Participants with chronic stroke can effectively use visual biofeedback to reduce paretic SL errors at higher speeds, supporting its integration into high-intensity gait training to simultaneously treat biomechanical impairments and walking capacity deficits after stroke.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

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

A Validated LBM Dataset and Pipeline for Surrogate Modeling of Turbulent 3D Obstructed Channel Flows

arXiv:2606.16765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating neural operators for 3D turbulent flow requires validated datasets with physical benchmarks. We present a reproducible pipeline generating training data for 3D channel flows around generated geometries at Re=1,000-10,000. Our lattice Boltzmann solver with cumulant collision operators is rigorously verified against experimental measurements (Strouhal number, drag coefficients, turbulent fluctuations) with comprehensive grid convergence studies at resolution 1024x512x512. Building upon an established framework, this validated pipeline enables standardized surrogate model comparison. We outline planned systematic evaluation of Fourier Neural Operator and U-Net variants on forecasting, super-resolution, and error correction tasks, using physics-informed metrics to assess turbulent energy cascade representation. Future work will compare computational efficiency between numerical solvers and neural surrogates, exploring practical application. We seek community feedback on our validation approach, planned benchmark methodology, and evaluation priorities for neural operators in turbulent flows.

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

A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR

End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliotheque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR available at https://github.com/MarcoPerson/ssm-ocr-benchmark.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

EgoSAT: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Egocentric Streaming Interaction Understanding

We introduce EgoSAT, the first comprehensive benchmark for egocentric video reasoning in streaming settings, designed to evaluate the capabilities of modern vision-language models (VLMs). The benchmark targets streaming interaction understanding, where video frames arrive sequentially and models must continuously interpret evolving visual context. EgoSAT unifies several previously distinct tasks within a single streaming framework. In this formulation, queries about completed events correspond to retrospective reasoning, queries about ongoing activities require online understanding, and queries about future actions involve prospective anticipation. This unified setting requires models to reason about the past, present, and future while operating under the constraint that only previously observed frames are available. EgoSAT contains 1,997 unique videos spanning 165 hours of egocentric footage and around 4,800 high-quality question-answer pairs, carefully designed to probe reasoning across varying temporal contexts. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of both open-weight and closed-weight VLMs, providing a systematic assessment of their ability for streaming interaction understanding. By distinguishing answerability and conducting diagnostics on confidence of models, we find existing models not only struggle with prospective and retrospective modeling, but also exhibit severe mis-calibration: confidence often fails to track inherent answerability, leading to dangerous "confidently wrong" behaviors. Project page: https://leiyj23.github.io/EgoSAT/

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Near-Optimal Learning of Local Lindbladians

arXiv:2606.20535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of learning local Lindbladians from black-box access to the physical evolution, and the goal is to estimate all Hamiltonian and dissipative coefficients. We give an algorithm built directly from finite-time channel probes, which runs the unknown evolution for short times, estimates the corresponding Pauli transfer matrices from classical shadows, and converts these estimates into Lindbladian coefficients by stable local Fourier inversions. For fixed locality and bounded dissipative site degree, the uses of the dynamical evolution and total evolution time scale as $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ and $\widetilde{O}(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ respectively, in the local dynamical strength bound $\Lambda$ and target accuracy $\varepsilon$, with only logarithmic dependence on the number of qubits. The algorithm is non-adaptive, uses no ancillas, and uses only random product states as inputs followed by random Pauli measurements. The method does not require knowing the support of the Lindbladian in advance. We complement the algorithm with matching lower bounds, showing that the learning algorithm is near-optimal both in physical dynamics accesses and in total evolution time. We construct a single-qubit dephasing Lindbladian family that already requires $\Omega(\Lambda^2/\varepsilon^2)$ channel uses and $\Omega(\Lambda/\varepsilon^2)$ total evolution time, even for adaptive algorithms with arbitrary ancillas and measurements. In particular, the lower bounds imply that the Heisenberg-limited scaling achievable for Hamiltonian learning is information-theoretically impossible once dissipative coefficients must be estimated.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Experiments with Optimal Model Trees

arXiv:2503.12902v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model trees provide an appealing way to perform interpretable machine learning for both classification and regression problems. In contrast to ``classic'' decision trees with constant values in their leaves, model trees can use linear combinations of predictor variables in their leaf nodes to form predictions, which can help achieve higher accuracy and smaller trees. Typical algorithms for learning model trees from training data work in a greedy fashion, growing the tree in a top-down manner by recursively splitting the data into smaller and smaller subsets. Crucially, the selected splits are only locally optimal, potentially rendering the tree overly complex and less accurate than a tree whose structure is globally optimal for the training data. In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of constructing globally optimal model trees for classification and regression with linear support vector machines at the leaf nodes. To this end, we present mixed-integer linear programming formulations to learn optimal trees, compute such trees for a large collection of benchmark data sets, and compare their performance against greedily grown model trees in terms of interpretability and accuracy. We also compare to classic optimal and greedily grown decision trees, random forests, and support vector machines. Our results show that optimal model trees can achieve competitive accuracy with very small trees. We also investigate the effect on the accuracy of replacing axis-parallel splits with multivariate ones, foregoing interpretability while potentially obtaining greater accuracy.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

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

Tail-Shape Estimation in LLM Evaluation Is Fragile: A Protocol for Diagnosing False Positives

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work motivates moving large language model (LLM) evaluation from mean-based to tail-aware metrics, including conditional value-at-risk and tail-index estimates of reward-model error. We ask whether the canonical extreme-value-theory tail-index parameter, which isolates how heavy a tail is from how large the tail mass is, adds discriminative information beyond the mean and a standard tail-magnitude statistic in LLM evaluation. We pre-register a protocol covering admissibility, goodness-of-fit, threshold-stability, and effect-size requirements for any positive tail-shape claim. The protocol is the contribution of this paper; the empirical study below is a demonstration of what its gates catch. Applied to a standard LLM toxicity-evaluation setup under two structurally different scorer families, the protocol catches three distinct modes of false positives that a naive analysis would have published, and rejects the headline tail-shape claim on both scorers. We conclude that tail-shape estimation in the LLM toxicity-evaluation setups we examined is more fragile than the recent literature suggests, and recommend the protocol as a starting point for tail-index claims in similar setups.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Making Models Unmergeable via Scaling-Sensitive Loss Landscape

arXiv:2601.21898v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rise of model hubs has made it easier to access reusable model components, making model merging a practical tool for combining capabilities. Yet, this modularity also creates a governance gap: downstream users can recompose released weights into unauthorized mixtures that bypass safety alignment or licensing terms. Because existing defenses are largely post-hoc and architecture-specific, they provide inconsistent protection across diverse architectures and release formats in practice. To close this gap, we propose Trap$^2$, an architecture-agnostic protection framework that encodes protection into updates during fine-tuning, regardless of whether they are released as adapters or full models. Instead of relying on architecture-dependent approaches, Trap$^2$ uses weight re-scaling as a simple proxy for the merging process. It keeps released weights effective in standalone use, but degrades them under re-scaling that often arises in merging, undermining unauthorized recomposition.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Epileptogenicity alters intrahippocampal ripple propagation

Objective: Tracing the propagation of high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) aids in localizing epileptogenic regions and improving surgical outcomes. We examined how hippocampal epileptogenicity influences the propagation properties of the HFOs it generates. Methods: We analyzed non-REM sleep stereo-EEG from 49 patients (68 hemispheres) with verified hippocampal contacts. Hippocampi were stratified by excitability: 28 seizure onset zone (SOZ), 22 more-irritative non-SOZ (>6 interictal epileptiform discharges [IED]/min), and 18 less-irritative non-SOZ (

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

ROMPAR: Morphological Completion and Demographic Unlearning for Romanian-Accented Speech Recognition

Automated transcription of parliamentary proceedings faces significant hurdles due to demographic bias, dialectal variation, and technical artifacts such as utterance truncation during segmentation. This paper introduces the ROManian PARliamentary Speech Corpus (ROMPAR) dataset, a 17.80-hour corpus of Romanian and Moldavian parliamentary speech, featuring double-annotated ground truth and explicit labels for reconstructed word fragments. To build a robust ASR system, we propose a multi-task adversarial training framework that enforces demographic invariance across age, gender, and dialect. We address the inherent instability of adversarial objectives in generative architectures by introducing an exponential decay mechanism for the adversarial coefficients. Furthermore, we implement an LLM-guided decoding strategy with position-dependent weighting to facilitate morphological completion of truncated terminal words. Our results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces WER and achieves an F1-score of 96.6% in morphological reconstruction.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

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

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies. Using a counterfactual resume design with 60 Japanese rirekisho-format resumes, 12 name pairs selected on linguistically grounded gender-signal criteria, and five state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B), we conducted 43,200 API calls across baseline, prompt instruction, and privacy filter conditions. A crossed random-effects linear mixed model confirms a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context. A prompt-level gender-neutrality instruction produces no meaningful reduction in bias. A name-reliance analysis formally identifies the candidate name as the primary gender channel: removing the name from the prompt reduces the female effect by nearly its full magnitude. An unexpected incompatibility between the privacy filter and GPT-4o's content safety filter, resulting in a 42% refusal rate, highlights a practical deployment challenge for name anonymization in LLM-assisted recruitment pipelines.

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

When Poison Fails After Retrieval: Revisiting Corpus Poisoning under Chunking and Reranking Pipelines

arXiv:2606.11265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate downstream model outputs through malicious knowledge injection. Existing studies mainly evaluate poisoning under simplified retrieval settings, overlooking practical RAG pipelines involving document chunking, dense retrieval, reranking, and grounded generation. In this paper, we revisit corpus poisoning under realistic multi-stage retrieval pipelines and show that many existing attacks substantially degrade after reranking despite achieving high retrieval-stage relevance. We identify retrieval granularity mismatch as a key reason for this failure: document-level adversarial signals are often fragmented during chunking, while rerankers favor locally coherent and answer-bearing passages rather than globally optimized semantic similarity. Based on this observation, we propose Chunk-aware and Rerank-Consistent Poisoning (CRCP), a poisoning framework that jointly optimizes retrieval relevance, reranker consistency, and chunk-boundary robustness. CRCP explicitly models chunking transformations during optimization to generate locally self-contained adversarial passages that remain effective under varying chunking configurations. Experiments on standard RAG benchmarks with multiple retrievers and rerankers show that existing poisoning methods are highly sensitive to chunk size and reranking strategies, whereas CRCP achieves substantially higher attack success rates and stronger robustness across realistic retrieval pipelines. Our findings highlight an important realism gap in current RAG security evaluation and suggest that poisoning in modern RAG systems should be studied as a multi-stage retrieval consistency problem rather than a retrieval-only problem.

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

Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons

arXiv:2606.16090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases.

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

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.

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

Learning aligned EEG representations with subject-specific encoders

arXiv:2606.16462v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-subject EEG decoding promises more training data, but it also exposes neural networks to strong inter-subject distribution shifts. We study whether task supervision and architecture alone can learn subject-aligned representations. We replace a shared EEG encoder with subject-specific encoders followed by a common classifier, and compare this hybrid model with standard EEGNet, AttentionBaseNet, and CTNet baselines with Euclidean Alignment (EA) on four motor-imagery datasets. EA improves shared encoders by recentering subject covariances, but the hybrid encoder largely internalises this role: validation-loss curves and latent-distance analyses change little when EA is removed. Subject-specific heads increase class distinctiveness and place each subject close to its own latent manifold, improving most subjects while leaving a method-sensitive subset. These results support subject-specific encoders as a learned alignment mechanism for EEG decoding and identify head selection for unseen subjects as the remaining bottleneck.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Visualizing "We the People": Bridging the Perception Gap through Pluralistic Data Storytelling

arXiv:2606.24635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional visual data storytelling relies on binary graphics that depict two simplified groups in conflict. This can increase political polarization by oversimplifying intra-group disagreements and erasing ambiguity and shared ideas or values. This can inadvertently foster "us versus them" thinking. Intentional, pluralistic design choices for AI-enabled digital platforms can produce visualizations that emphasize nuance, opinion distribution, and intergroup commonalities. To demonstrate this potential, we examine deliberative technologies that map high-dimensional opinion spaces and highlight areas of both consensus and dissensus. The paper highlights the We the People deliberation conducted by Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute in September 2025, which engaged over 2,400 Americans across all 435 congressional districts in an AI-supported, asynchronous dialogue regarding freedom and equality. By utilizing AI to synthesize long-form, text-based participant inputs into interactive "opinion landscapes," the initiative provided an alternative format for pluralistic data storytelling that humanized diverse viewpoints and revealed hidden areas of substantial broad consensus. The paper concludes that shifting from divisive, contrast-heavy visual frameworks to distribution-focused, interactive models represents a highly scalable, low-cost intervention capable of bridging perceptual gaps and cultivating a more resilient, collaborative democratic culture.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impulse Decoding of Quantum LDPC Codes: Equivalence of Degeneracy and Code-Shortening

arXiv:2606.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction is essential for building scalable quantum computers. Within the stabilizer formalism, the Calderbank-Shor-Steane framework constructs quantum codes from pairs of classical linear codes. A distinctive feature in this setting is degeneracy, where multiple equivalent error estimates exist-a phenomenon that has no classical counterpart, and the lack of a meaningful classical coding-theoretic interpretation of which has remained a gap in the literature. In this paper, we demonstrate that degeneracy is closely related to the classical operation of shortening of a linear block code. Interestingly, the shortening here takes place at the decoder rather than at the encoder. Leveraging this insight, we present a parallel decoding scheme for quantum low-density parity-check codes, which we term impulse decoding, that significantly outperforms belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding, as well as several other existing techniques, under both code-capacity and circuit-level noise, with significantly lesser complexity. We then present another algorithm based on decoding of residual errors, which when combined with impulse decoding achieves further performance improvement under circuit-level noise.

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

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.