Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12877

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

Authors:

Meiru Li↗Maimaitiyiming Tusun↗Fang Zhao↗Hasiyatihan Abudoula↗Tongcheng Wei↗

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2602.11467

PRISM: A 3D Probabilistic Neural Representation for Interpretable Shape Modeling

Authors:

Yining Jiao↗Sreekalyani Bhamidi↗Carlton Jude Zdanski↗Julia S Kimbell↗Andrew Prince↗Cameron P Worden↗Samuel Kirse↗Christopher Rutter↗Benjamin H Shields↗Jisan Mahmud↗Marc Niethammer↗

arXiv:2602.11467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how anatomical shapes evolve in response to developmental covariates - and quantifying their spatially varying uncertainties - is critical in healthcare research. Existing approaches typically rely on global time-warping formulations that ignore spatially heterogeneous dynamics. We introduce PRISM, a novel framework that bridges implicit neural representations with uncertainty-aware statistical shape analysis. PRISM models the conditional distribution of shapes given covariates, providing spatially continuous estimates of both the population mean and covariate-dependent uncertainty at arbitrary locations. A key theoretical contribution is a closed-form Fisher Information metric that enables efficient, analytically tractable local temporal uncertainty quantification via automatic differentiation. Experiments on three synthetic datasets and one clinical dataset demonstrate PRISM's strong performance across diverse tasks - from modeling shape evolution to personalized shape prediction and anomaly detection - within a unified framework, while providing interpretable and clinically meaningful uncertainty estimates.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16214

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

Authors:

Tobias Jan Wieczorek↗Leon de Andrade↗Thomas M\"ollenhoff↗Marcus Rohrbach↗

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2510.06647

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

Authors:

Haochen Zhang↗Zhong Zheng↗Lingzhou Xue↗

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.22664

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

Authors:

Thomson Yen↗Julian Poeltl↗Harshith Srinivas Gear↗Yilin Meng↗Joshua Fan↗Adam Shen↗Yili Liu↗Ali Bauyrzhan↗Siri Du↗Haoyang Liu↗Daniel Guetta↗Hongseok Namkoong↗…

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13494

NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation

Authors:

Daichi Azuma↗Taiki Miyanishi↗Koya Sakamoto↗Shuhei Kurita↗Yaonan Zhu↗Petr Khrapchenkov↗Motoaki Kawanabe↗Yusuke Iwasawa↗Yutaka Matsuo↗

Goal-conditioned visual navigation requires a robot to act under partial observability by anticipating how its motion will change the future egocentric view and whether that change brings it closer to the goal. Navigation world models provide such visual foresight, but they remain prediction modules that require an external planner to convert predicted futures into closed-loop control. We propose Navigation World Action Model (NavWAM), a diffusion-transformer policy that turns navigation world-model prediction into executable action by representing future observations, goal-progress values, and action chunks in a shared latent sequence. By learning future prediction jointly with the action and value targets that determine closed-loop behavior, NavWAM makes visual foresight directly usable for robot control. We build NavWAM through simulation pretraining and real-robot adaptation, and evaluate it on image-goal navigation against planning-based world models and a representative direct navigation policy. Across offline benchmarks and closed-loop real-robot deployment, NavWAM improves over planning-based world-model baselines in our evaluations while using the default policy mode without CEM-style action search. Project page: https://dachii-azm.github.io/navwam/

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15837

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Authors:

Jimut B. Pal↗Suyash P. Awate↗

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

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08.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:d28a2c07fea35854d58a1b38f4e722ed

Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection

Authors:

A. Paetznick↗

Performing quantum algorithms for critical problems in physics and chemistry requires substantially lower error rates than the physical error rates of present quantum computers. Achieving such low logical error rates requires quantum error correction1,2 and physical error rates below a critical threshold value3–8. We experimentally demonstrate on a trapped-ion quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD)9,10 improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines, including quantum computation on multiple qubits. Our results hinge on two quantum error correction code constructions optimized for an ion-trap processor: a 12-qubit code encoding two qubits inspired by Knill11 and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four qubits12,13. These constructions are combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection to achieve reduced logical error rates. Our results show that state-of-the-art quantum devices are already able to make use of fault tolerance and error correction to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial quantum circuit computations. Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12051

MFEN:Multi-Frequency Expert Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-ID

Authors:

Xulin Li↗Yan Lu↗Bin Liu↗Qinhong Yang↗Qi Chu↗Tao Gong↗Nenghai Yu↗

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to the large modality discrepancy between visible and infrared images. We contend that this discrepancy is largely related to differing lighting conditions, including differences in light wavelength and light source type. Recently, frequency-based VI-ReID approaches have achieved notable success because frequency information can better extract identity-relevant contours and details while excluding irrelevant lighting and color. However, existing methods either do not distinguish different frequency bands or focus on only one band, which is insufficient under diverse lighting conditions. To perform comprehensive frequency domain learning, we propose a Multi-Frequency Expert Network (MFEN) that enables multi-frequency modulation and adaptively combines different bands through a mixture-of-experts design. We further introduce Random Frequency Augmentation (RFA) and Frequency Auxiliary Optimization (FAO) to better train MFEN. The three modules are complementary and jointly capture critical frequency-domain details for robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on three VI-ReID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17650

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Authors:

Hao-Yuan Ma↗Li Zhang↗Minjie Qiang↗Jie Gao↗

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.11911

Understanding Sample Efficiency in Predictive Coding

Authors:

Gaspard Oliviers↗Elene Lominadze↗Rafal Bogacz↗

arXiv:2605.11911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) is an influential account of cortical learning. Much of recent work has focused on comparing PC to Backpropagation (BP) to find whether PC offers any advantages. Small scale experiments show that PC enables learning that is more sample efficient and effective in many contexts, though a thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomena remains elusive. To address this, we quantify the efficiency of learning in BP and PC through a metric called ``target alignment'', which measures how closely the change in the output of the network is aligned to the output prediction error. We then derive and empirically validate analytical expressions for target alignment in Deep Linear Networks. We show that learning in PC is more efficient than BP, which is especially pronounced in deep, narrow and pre-trained networks. We also derive exact conditions for guaranteed optimal target alignment in PC and validate our findings through experiments. We study full training trajectories of linear and non-linear models, and find the predicted benefits of PC persist in practice even when some assumptions are violated. Overall, this work provides a mechanistic understanding of the higher learning efficiency observed for PC over BP in previous works, and can guide how PC should be parametrised to learn most effectively.

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12.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:675221b4c30dfbcc0553c780ac3c1ca7

Navigating a crowded developing brain leaves neurons with broken DNA

Authors:

Monica D. Manam↗

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails. As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.

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13.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:0efee22e896d007187f998cdafed6089

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Authors:

Emmert-Fees↗K. M. F↗Meyer↗Laxy↗Hanselmann↗

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14447

Dealing with locality in QAOA

Authors:

Mithilesh Kumar↗Yusuf Tahir↗

arXiv:2606.14447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shallow-depth QAOA on sparse, high-diameter MaxCut instances faces a locality bottleneck: at depth \(p\), local observables can depend only on a bounded neighborhood of the circuit interaction graph. We propose a transport-augmented QAOA that keeps the MaxCut cost Hamiltonian unchanged but enriches the mixer with optimized, unweighted shortcut couplings (scheduled \(XX+YY\)) to collapse the effective interaction-graph diameter. Using exact finite-depth support recursions, we relate optimal shortcut placement to bounded-diameter graph augmentation, and show in benchmarks that (unlike ma-QAOA) performance becomes effectively size-invariant once the diameter is reduced. For bipartite families (base diameter 4), reducing the interaction path to \(d=1\) raises the ensemble-averaged approximation ratio from 0.7378 (ma-QAOA) to 0.9767 at \(p=1\) (\(\sigma=0.0251\), nine system sizes); on random trees (base diameter 10), at \(p=2\) it improves from 0.9226 to 0.9997 (\(\sigma=0.0001\)).

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.03085

Multi-component Causal Tracing in Large Language Models

Authors:

Zirui Yan↗Dennis Wei↗Dmitriy A. Katz↗Prasanna Sattigeri↗Ali Tajer↗

Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model's (LLM's) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM's behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model's components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZiruiYan/multi-component-causal-tracing.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.16651

Right Predictions, Misleading Explanations: On the Vulnerability of Vision-Language Model Explanations

Authors:

Narges Babadi↗Hadis Karimipour↗

Explanation mechanisms are increasingly used to support transparency and trust in vision-language models (VLMs), particularly in settings where model decisions require human oversight. However, the robustness of these explanations remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate whether explanation heatmaps in VLMs, particularly CLIP-based models, faithfully reflect model reasoning under adversarial conditions. We show that explanation maps can be systematically manipulated while preserving the model's original prediction, revealing a disconnect between predictive behavior and explanation faithfulness. To study this vulnerability, we introduce X-Shift, a novel grey-box attack that perturbs patch-level visual representations to redirect explanation heatmaps toward semantically irrelevant regions without altering the predicted output. Unlike conventional adversarial attacks that aim to induce misclassification, X-Shift specifically targets the integrity of the explanation process itself. The attack operates without modifying model parameters and generalizes across multiple CLIP architectures and explanation methods. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-1k, MS-COCO, and Flickr30K, demonstrating consistent degradation in explanation alignment under imperceptible perturbations while maintaining prediction stability. Furthermore, standard prediction-oriented adversarial attacks fail to reproduce the same explanation-shifting behavior even under substantially larger perturbation budgets. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current explanation mechanisms in VLMs and raise concerns about their use as reliable indicators of model trustworthiness in high-impact applications.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19354

Granularity-Regulated Adaptive Computational Efficiency for Optimal Verification in Test-Time Scaling

Authors:

Ardit Krasniqi↗Luan Vejsiu↗Elira Dervishi↗

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by investing additional compute at inference time. A central component of TTS is the verifier, which selects or scores candidate solutions to guide the search process. While prior work has explored the benefit of verification, a fundamental question remains underexplored: what is the optimal granularity of verification under a given compute budget? Coarse-grained outcome reward models (ORMs) and fine-grained process reward models (PRMs) represent two extremes, yet neither alone achieves compute-optimality across all regimes. In this paper, we establish a unified theoretical framework, called GRACE (\underline{G}ranularity-\underline{R}egulated \underline{A}daptive \underline{C}omputational \underline{E}fficiency), that characterizes the optimal verification granularity as an explicit function of problem difficulty, verifier accuracy, and compute budget. We prove that there exists a phase transition: fine-grained verification dominates when either the compute budget is large or the problem is hard, whereas coarse-grained verification is preferred in the low-budget, easy-problem regime. Our theory unifies Best-of-$N$, beam search, and step-level MCTS within a single Pareto-optimality framework, and motivates an adaptive granularity strategy that provably achieves the compute-performance Pareto frontier. Empirical results on MATH-500, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks corroborate all four theoretical claims, with our adaptive strategy outperforming fixed-granularity baselines by up to 3.1\% accuracy at matched compute.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17398

SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing

Authors:

Yujeong Kwon↗Yiyue Zhang↗Shakhzod Yuldoshkhujaev↗Kexin Pei↗Dokyung Song↗Hyungjoon Koo↗

arXiv:2606.17398v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary reversing is fundamental to software understanding, vulnerability discovery, malware investigation, and firmware auditing. However, it remains inherently challenging due to the irreversible loss of semantic information during compilation. Recent advances in machine learning, large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI systems have accelerated the adoption of AI-augmented binary reversing. Yet, the resulting body of work has become increasingly fragmented across reversing domains, artifact representations, learning approaches, and evaluation practices. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on AI-augmented binary reversing. We analyze 144 research papers published since 2015, and organize them into 22 binary reversing domains according to the inference tasks. We further introduce a unified taxonomy spanning conventional and AI-augmented reversing pipelines. Our taxonomy connects traditional analysis techniques, binary-derived artifacts, representation strategies, learning paradigms, and downstream inference tasks, while clarifying the emerging roles of LLMs and agentic AI systems. By establishing a common vocabulary and structured framework, we provide a holistic view of the field's evolution over the past decade. Our study reveals common structures underlying seemingly disparate approaches, highlights persistent technical challenges and evaluation gaps, and identifies promising opportunities for future research. Collectively, these insights clarify the current state of the field and provide a foundation for the next generation of reliable and scalable AI-augmented binary reversing systems.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18286

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

Authors:

Zhijie Deng↗Ling Li↗Jinlong Pang↗Kaiqin Hu↗Qi Xuan↗Zhaowei Zhu↗Jiaheng Wei↗

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14270

Robust Fall Recovery for Armless Bipedal-Wheeled Robots Via Force-Guided Learning

Authors:

Haidong Hou↗Zhangguo Yu↗Tao Han↗Hengbo Qi↗Khaleel Ghazal↗Yu Zhang↗Yidong Du↗Xuechao Chen↗Fei Meng↗

arXiv:2606.14270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fall recovery is critical for autonomous legged locomotion. Existing methods have demonstrated that some legged robots, such as humanoids and quadrupeds, are capable of fall recovery from diverse postures by utilizing arms or coordinating multi-legs to generate support forces. Without arms or other legs to provide supportive assistance, a bipedal-wheeled robot must rely solely on the actuation of its legs, making recovery particularly difficult. To address this, we introduce FTSR (Force-guided Teacher-student framework with Stage-wise Rewards). The force-guided method constructs an external auxiliary force during simulation training that correlates directly with the robot's real-time height, explicitly formulating this force as an optimizable constraint. Through constrained reinforcement learning, the policy is guided toward reducing force dependency gradually and increasing the body height, developing internal recovery strategies despite having no arms for support. Height-progressive stage-Wise rewards progressively structure posture stabilization during recovery and transition to sustained locomotion, integrated with teacher-student architecture distilling privileged knowledge of force effects and recovery dynamics. After simulation training, the policy is deployed on a physical armless bipedal-wheeled robot and extensively evaluated. Experiments confirm robust and reliable fall recovery under diverse challenging conditions, demonstrating strong environmental adaptability and motion robustness, while maintaining full post-recovery motion capability. The framework also generalizes effectively to a high-DOF humanoid, confirming its practical generalizability. The project page is available at https://2350575870.github.io/force-guided.github.io/

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2504.11320

Optimizing LLM Inference: Fluid-Guided Online Scheduling with Memory Constraints

Authors:

Ruicheng Ao↗Gan Luo↗David Simchi-Levi↗Xinshang Wang↗

arXiv:2504.11320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models now serve millions of users daily, with providers incurring costs exceeding $700,000 per day. Each request requires token-by-token inference, making GPU scheduling central to latency, capacity, and cost. The difficulty is endogenous memory growth: generated tokens expand the Key-Value (KV) cache, and overflow can evict in-progress requests and waste prior computation. We formulate inference as a multi-stage online scheduling problem with endogenous memory growth, linear iteration times, and GPU-resident KV-cache constraints. We introduce a fluid model that characterizes equilibrium batch composition, memory requirement, and stability region. Guided by the fluid model, we design WAIT (Waiting for Accumulated Inference Threshold), a threshold-based admission rule for known output lengths, and Nested WAIT, which extends the rule to unknown output lengths by regulating how requests advance across decode-stage segments. Both algorithms approximate the fluid benchmark asymptotically under the stated memory conditions. Nested WAIT uses an additional safety buffer of moderate scale to hedge against memory-overflow-induced evictions under unknown output lengths. In Vidur simulations configured for Llama-2-7B on an A100 GPU, with supplemental real-GPU validation reported in the appendix, the policies enlarge the empirically observed stable operating range relative to widely used baseline algorithms and reduce latency especially in near-overloaded and overloaded regimes.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20475

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

Authors:

Mingyu Yang↗Keye Zheng↗Congchao Cheng↗Yujie Liu↗Xingkang Lu↗Fan Jiang↗Yefei Zheng↗

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11244

SPEAR: A System for Post-Quantization Error-Adaptive Recovery Enabling Efficient Low-Bit LLM Serving

Authors:

Hongyuan Liu↗Yawei Li↗Zhiqiang Que↗Qinli Yang↗Junming Shao↗Guosheng Hu↗

arXiv:2606.11244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient large language model (LLM) serving is increasingly constrained by deployment cost. Quantization is a key technique for reducing serving cost, yet even state-of-the-art 4-bit quantizers exhibit a noticeable quality gap from FP16, particularly for smaller models where low-bit serving is most beneficial. We identify a fundamental cause of this gap: quantization error is highly input-dependent and varies substantially across tokens, while existing post-quantization compensation methods are static and apply identical corrections to all inputs. As a result, easy tokens are over-corrected while hard tokens remain under-corrected. We present SPEAR, a system for post-quantization error-adaptive recovery that improves low-bit LLM serving. SPEAR introduces lightweight Error Compensators (ECs) modulated by per-token gates and places them only at the most error-sensitive layers identified through a CKA-guided entropy-aware diagnostic. This focuses a small parameter budget where it is most effective. Efficient deployment of ECs presents several systems challenges, including additional computation, tensor-parallel synchronization caused by input-dependent gating, and latency instability across configurations. SPEAR addresses these issues through adaptive kernel-fusion dispatch, combining an epilogue-integrated peer-reduction kernel with P2P dual-write to fuse the post-EC computation into low-bit GEMMs, and an SLO-constrained EC-aware scheduler for predictable serving performance. Across challenging per-channel quantization settings, SPEAR recovers 56-75% of the perplexity gap between W4 and FP16 while adding less than 1% model memory overhead and maintaining latency comparable to a widely used 4-bit serving deployment.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19850

Neural Additive and Basis Models with Feature Selection and Interactions

Authors:

Yasutoshi Kishimoto↗Kota Yamanishi↗Takuya Matsuda↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2606.19850v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit attractive performance in various fields but often suffer from low interpretability. The neural additive model (NAM) and its variant called the neural basis model (NBM) use neural networks (NNs) as nonlinear shape functions in generalized additive models (GAMs). Both models are highly interpretable and exhibit good performance and flexibility for NN training. NAM and NBM can provide and visualize the contribution of each feature to the prediction owing to GAM-based architectures. However, when using two-input NNs to consider feature interactions or when applying them to high-dimensional datasets, training NAM and NBM becomes intractable due to the increase in the computational resources required. This paper proposes incorporating the feature selection mechanism into NAM and NBM to resolve computational bottlenecks. We introduce the feature selection layer in both models and update the selection weights during training. Our method is simple and can reduce computational costs and model sizes compared to vanilla NAM and NBM. In addition, it enables us to use two-input NNs even in high-dimensional datasets and capture feature interactions. We demonstrate that the proposed models are computationally efficient compared to vanilla NAM and NBM, and they exhibit better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art GAMs.

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25.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11503

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

Authors:

Caio Alves↗Rangel Baldasso↗Carlos Gustavo Moreira↗Augusto Teixeira↗

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

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