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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

IndustryBench-MIPU: Benchmarking Multi-Image Attribute Value Extraction for Industrial Products

Industrial products such as valves and circuit breakers are defined by dense technical specifications that govern procurement, compatibility, and safety across supply chains. These specifications are scattered across multiple heterogeneous product images, including specification tables, nameplates, and technical drawings, yet whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reliably recover them remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce IndustryBench-MIPU, the first large-scale benchmark for multi-image industrial product understanding, built around structured attribute extraction – recovering property-value pairs from product images. This task jointly probes text recognition on specification tables and nameplates, visual reasoning over technical drawings, domain knowledge to decode industrial terminology, and cross-image evidence integration to assemble scattered specifications. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 4,559 products across 27,652 images with 103,703 annotations spanning 18 industrial categories, constructed through multi-model consensus and three-tier quality assurance. Evaluating nine MLLMs under both single-image and product-level multi-image settings reveals a stark completeness gap: models achieve high precision (86–94%) but the best recovers only 49.9% of product-level attributes; moving from single-image to multi-image extraction costs 15–34 percentage points of recall. Multi-image completeness, not single-image accuracy, is the core bottleneck. Dataset and code are publicly available.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset: A Historical Document Dataset for Offline Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition with CRNN-Based Baseline Evaluation

Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is inherently a challenging task, and its complexity is further increased when dealing with cursive scripts. Although significant efforts have been made on various cursive scripts, research regarding Urdu Handwritten Text Recognition (UHTR) has been relatively limited. This lag of research is primarily due to the unique challenges posed by its script, and the scarcity and unavailability of benchmark datasets. Therefore, to advance research in UHTR, this study presents a specialized real dataset called the Urdu Katib Handwritten Dataset (UKHD). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first offline Urdu handwritten text lines dataset specifically curated from the materials written by Katibs in historical times. It encompasses a diverse range of flat nib writing variations in the Nastalique calligraphic style. Additionally, the effectiveness of different CRNN-based hybrid models has been evaluated to identify the optimal architecture for Urdu Katib Handwriting Recognition (UKHR). Among the analyzed models, the CNN-BGRU-CTC model showed more robust performance, with low Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER). This research work aims to support and encourage the research community in developing a robust recognition system for preserving Urdu handwritten literature.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

PP-OCRv6: From 1.5M to 34.5M Parameters, Surpassing Billion-Scale VLMs on OCR Tasks

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on general vision-language tasks, yet they suffer from hallucination, imprecise localization, and prohibitive computational cost when applied to dedicated OCR scenarios. This paper presents PP-OCRv6, a lightweight OCR system that combines architectural innovation with data-centric optimization. PP-OCRv6 redesigns the backbone, detection neck, and recognition neck around a unified MetaFormer-style building block with structural reparameterization, decoupling spatial token mixing from channel mixing and supporting both tasks through task-specific stride configurations. Three model tiers (medium, small, tiny) share the same block primitives, covering deployment scenarios from server to edge. On our in-house benchmarks, PP-OCRv6_medium achieves 83.2% recognition accuracy and 86.2% detection Hmean, outperforming PP-OCRv5_server by +5.1% and +4.6% respectively while surpassing Qwen3-VL-235B, GPT-5.5, and Gemini-3.1-Pro with orders of magnitude fewer parameters. The tiny tier achieves 3.9$\times$ faster inference than PP-OCRv5_mobile on Intel Xeon CPU while maintaining comparable accuracy.

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

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.

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

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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

A specialized reasoning large language model for accelerating rare disease diagnosis: a randomized AI physician assistance trial

Rare diseases affect millions of individuals worldwide, yet timely diagnosis remains a major public health challenge due to scarcity of specialized clinical expertise. While large language models (LLMs) show promise to support rare disease diagnosis, current models are constrained by insufficient clinical deployability, limited clinically grounded evidence, and scarcity of training data. Here we present RaDaR (Rare Disease navigatoR), an open-source, compact reasoning LLM (32B parameters) for rare disease diagnosis. RaDaR was trained with 49,170 publicly available free-text cases and 104,666 synthetic cases with reasoning-enhanced training. RaDaR showed the strongest performance among evaluated open-source models, including the 671B DeepSeek-R1, across public benchmarks and four external validation centers. In a retrospective cohort, RaDaR prioritized the final diagnosis before documented clinical suspicion in 61.06 percent of cases, corresponding to a potential lead time of 1.87 months and 50.18 percent of the within-center interval. In a randomized physician-assistance trial, RaDaR assistance improved physicians' rare-disease diagnostic accuracy by 21.44 percentage points compared with internet search alone. Synthetic-data ablations suggested that phenotype-anchored narratives provide useful training signal for long-tail rare diseases, with a monotonic scaling trend within the tested data range. Together, RaDaR and its development and validation framework provide a deployable rare-disease reasoning model and a reproducible development framework for diagnostic AI under data scarcity.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Neuro-Relational Programs: Unifying Queries and Neural Computation over Structured Data

arXiv:2606.11946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The conventional approach to deep learning over relational databases applies neural models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), to a graph representation of the database. Recent approaches instead operate on databases directly, associating tuples with embeddings and extending query mechanisms to jointly process embeddings and relational content. Inspired by these developments, we introduce Neuro-Relational Programs (NRPs), a declarative query language for relational databases whose facts carry numeric vector embeddings. NRPs extend Datalog-style rules with operations that combine, aggregate, and transform embeddings, thereby interleaving relational reasoning and learnable neural components within a single formalism. This yields a general approach to neural computation over relational data: an NRP can be read both as a query plan with trainable components and as a neural architecture with relational structure built in. Natural syntactic fragments of NRPs recover existing architectures and query formalisms. Zero-ary NRPs correspond to non-adaptive query algorithms; monadic NRPs generalize GNN-style message passing and precisely capture Deep Homomorphism Networks, a connection that we extend to frontier-guarded NRPs over databases with row-ids. We characterize the expressive power of unrestricted NRPs with ReLU-FFN transformations by FOCQ, an extension of first-order logic with counting interpreted over real-weighted structures, yielding a precise connection with uniform TC$^0$ over ordered databases. Together, these results establish NRPs as a broad declarative framework for querying and neural computation over relational data.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CTS-MoE: Implicit Terrain Adaptation via Mixture-of-Experts for Perceptive Locomotion

arXiv:2606.19633v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceptive legged locomotion over discontinuous terrain (e.g., stairs, gaps, and obstacles) requires adaptive behavior, as a single conservative gait cannot produce the anticipatory maneuvers needed for abrupt topology changes. Cast as multi-task reinforcement learning, this problem introduces a tension between sharing and separation. Tasks use a common locomotion base but have conflicting rewards, so a policy must share behavior while avoiding value interference. Prior work addresses only one side, with monolithic policies sacrificing specialization and hierarchical sub-policies sacrificing generalization across transitions and unseen terrain. We propose CTS-MoE, which combines a dense mixture-of-experts actor with perception-based gating to compose shared behaviors and a multi-critic with task-specific value heads to prevent interference. The model is trained end-to-end in a single-stage concurrent teacher-student setup that handles partial observability and avoids sequential distillation, with task labels used only during training. At deployment, routing depends solely on perception, allowing terrain adaptation without a high-level selector or terrain classifier. Experiments on a Unitree Go1 in simulation and on hardware across seen and unseen terrains show task-aware specialization, with lower tracking error and higher success rates than monolithic baselines. Project Website: https://cts-moe.github.io/ .

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

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Assessment of occupational aerosol exposure for laboratory technicians: A quantitative study using {Phi}X174 phage as a substitute virus

Authors:

This study aimed to clarify aerosol exposure risks throughout the workflow of a Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) polymerase chain reaction (PCR) laboratory, validate the suitability of the {Phi}X174 bacteriophage as an indicator virus, and provide evidence for biosafety control measures. The {Phi}X174 bacteriophage was used to simulate viral samples, and a concentration-bacteriophage plaque standard curve was constructed (R2=0.998). Five operational steps in a simulated PCR laboratory were quantitatively monitored for aerosol concentration using double-layer agar plates, with blank controls used to eliminate interference. Statistical analysis was employed to identify risk differences. Sample homogenization ((5.67 {+/-} 1.23) x 104 plaque-forming units (PFU)/m3) and nucleic acid extraction ((3.45 {+/-} 0.89) x 104 PFU/m3) were identified as high-/very high-risk steps. The viral load in the samples was strongly positively correlated with the aerosol concentration (r = 0.926, P

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MorVess: Morphology-Aware Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation Network

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

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

REDI-Match: Rotation-Equivariant Distillation for Efficient and Robust Dense Matching

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs. Consequently, current frameworks typically freeze VFMs and shift the entire burden of rotation generalization to the downstream decoder. To break this architectural bottleneck, we propose REDI-Match, an efficient framework driven by a novel Rotation-Equivariant Distillation (REDI) paradigm. Instead of relying on rotation data augmentation to establish rotational correspondences, REDI distills the non-equivariant semantic representations of a VFM into a lightweight, strictly rotation-equivariant encoder, leveraging an equivariant geometric architecture to constrain robust high-dimensional semantics. To fully exploit these features, we equip the decoder with an entropy-driven spatial alignment module. By evaluating discrete rotation hypotheses, this mechanism explicitly locks onto the canonical coordinate system, eliminating global ambiguity before continuous refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REDI-Match establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across multiple benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a 13.89% absolute pose accuracy improvement on the highly challenging SatAst dataset while operating 1.9x faster than the current SOTA (RoMa v2), enabling real-time inference (~41 FPS) on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Code: https://github.com/YinjiGe/REDI-Match.

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

Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL): Benchmarking Weakly Supervised Learning for Aerial Wildlife Surveys

Automated aerial wildlife surveys increasingly rely on deep learning, yet standard object detectors require bounding-box annotations, reported to be up to seven times slower and three times more expensive to produce than point-level labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Overhead Wildlife Locator (OWL), a weakly supervised density-estimation framework with three variants: OWL-C, a fully convolutional model for high-throughput screening; OWL-T, a Swin-augmented hybrid for heterogeneous, cluttered scenes; and OWL-D, built on a frozen DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder with a DPT-style fusion decoder. We benchmark all three against POLO, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv11l across five public aerial datasets, from sparse fixed-wing savanna surveys to dense UAV paddock imagery, and against the published HerdNet baseline on its native Delplanque split. OWL-D sets a new state of the art on Delplanque (0.934 AP vs. HerdNet's 0.840) and records the highest AP on four of the five datasets. Performance is regime-dependent: on the extreme-density SheepCounter UAV dataset the hybrid OWL-T leads (0.978 AP) and the convolutional variants attain the lowest counting error, whereas the foundation-based OWL-D degrades, indicating which variant suits which survey type. We further validate operational readiness on the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's 2022 Central Arctic Caribou census: under cross-herd and cross-temporal transfer, OWL-C fine-tuned on the 2017 Porcupine Caribou Herd split attains F1 = 0.965 on a held-out patch test set, with a signed count error of +3.1% aggregated across the released test patches. We release the OWL code, model weights, and the annotated Porcupine Caribou Herd 2017 (PCH) and Central Arctic Herd 2022 (CAH) patches, the first open patch-level datasets for large-scale caribou aerial surveys, at https://github.com/microsoft/MegaDetector-Overhead.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Power Partitions and Hayman Functions

arXiv:2602.18575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove, within the probabilistic framework of Khinchin families, that the generating function $P_k$ of partitions into $k$-th powers is strongly Gaussian in the sense of Báez-Duarte, and even further that it is a Hayman function. Thus the Hardy–Ramanujan asymptotic formula for the number $p_k(n)$ of partitions of $n$ into $k$-th powers which reads \[ p_k(n) \sim \frac{\alpha_k}{n^{(3k+1)/(2k+2)}} \exp\!\Big(\beta_k\, n^{1/(k+1)}\Big), \qquad n\to\infty, \] where $\alpha_k$ and~$\beta_k$ are explicit constants depending only on $k$, follows directly from Hayman's asymptotic formula for strongly Gaussian power series. The proof of strong Gaussianity of $P_k$ combines a Gaussianity criterion for Khinchin families with certain bounds of Tenenbaum, Wu and Li on the generating function; the asymptotic formula is recovered by computing asymptotic approximations of the mean and variance of the associated family. Analogous results are presented for the generating function $Q_k$ of partitions into distinct $k$-th powers.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Computing Applications for Flight Trajectory Optimization

arXiv:2304.14445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Major players in the global aerospace industry are shifting their focus toward achieving net carbon-neutral operations by 2050. A considerable portion of the overall carbon emission reduction is expected to come from new aircraft technologies, such as flight path optimization. In pursuing these sustainability objectives, we delve into the capacity of quantum computing to tackle computational challenges associated with flight path optimization, an essential operation within the aerospace engineering domain with important ecological and economic considerations. In recent years, the quantum computing field has made significant strides, paving the way for improved performance over classical algorithms. In order to effectively apply quantum algorithms in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to thoroughly examine and tackle the intrinsic overheads and constraints that exist in the present implementations of these algorithms. Our study delves into the application of quantum computers in flight path optimization problems and introduces a customizable modular framework designed to accommodate specific simulation requirements. We examine the running time of a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm across various quantum architectures and their simulations on CPUs and GPUs. A temporal comparison between the conventional classical algorithm and its quantum-improved counterpart indicates that achieving the theoretical speedup in practice may necessitate further innovation. We present our results from running the quantum algorithms on IBM hardware and discuss potential approaches to accelerate the incorporation of quantum algorithms within the problem domain.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Q-DICE: Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator

arXiv:2606.11340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers a leading path towards scalable quantum computation, the ability to benchmark distributed algorithms under realistic conditions becomes critical for system co-design. However, without access to physical systems, researchers lack tools to evaluate distribution protocols. We introduce Q-DICE (Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator), a hardware-aware emulation environment for benchmarking distributed quantum circuits on classical simulators and on NISQ-era monolithic hardware. This work provides three core contributions: (1) a programmatic scheme to construct distributed QPU backends, utilizing two novel techniques - QPU slicing and stitching - to facilitate distributed circuit mapping, (2) a methodology for modeling nonlocal link noise using physically motivated Kraus operators and stochastic error channels, and (3) a boundary-aware circuit mapping algorithm enforcing distributed QPU topology constraints during transpilation. Together, these components constitute a distribution-aware compiler and noise-modeling engine that faithfully enforces the physical limitations of distributed quantum hardware within existing execution environments. We validate Q-DICE against a multitude of experimentally demonstrated quantum circuits, including a distributed Grover's search on optically linked trapped-ion hardware, achieving a worst-case fidelity deviation of 4% between simulated and experimental results. These findings demonstrate Q-DICE's capacity to accurately reproduce real distributed quantum system behavior across platforms, streamlining experimentation with distributed quantum algorithms and architectures.

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

ViTexQA: A Multi-Frame Temporal Perception Dataset for Video Text Question Answering

Despite remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, current MLLMs still exhibit limitations in video text understanding, particularly when semantics emerge through the integration of temporally distributed textual cues across multiple frames. This perception challenge fundamentally differs from static image text understanding, yet existing datasets fail to capture: the vast majority of questions remain answerable from single frames, inadequately reflecting real-world video text comprehension demands. To address this, we present ViTexQA, a large-scale video-text QA dataset, and FrameThinker for robust multi-frame temporal reasoning. We build ViTexQA via a quality-controlled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotation pipeline boosted with temporal constraints; all its QA pairs demand cross-frame text fusion to solve, enforcing true temporal reliance. FrameThinker adopts two-stage training for explicit temporal modeling: CoT-Guided Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) generates frame-aware reasoning chains, followed by Temporally-grounded Reinforcement Learning (RL) optimized with multi-frame coherence rewards. Evaluations show our method outperforms SOTA baselines on ViTexQA, lifting ROUGE-L by 6.3%.