Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16031

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

Authors:

Lei Sun↗Hang Guo↗Bin Ren↗Shaolin Su↗Xian Wang↗Danda Pani Paudel↗Luc Van Gool↗Radu Timofte↗Yawei Li↗

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24333

UniTranslator: A Unified Multi-modal Framework for End-to-end In-Image Machine Translation

Authors:

Jiahao Lyu↗Pei Fu↗Zhenhang Li↗Shaojie Zhang↗Jiahui Yang↗Yu Zhou↗Can Ma↗Zhenbo Luo↗Jian Luan↗

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate scene text in an image and render the translated text back into the original regions while preserving the overall visual appearance. Recent unified multimodal models provide a promising solution by combining visual-text understanding and image generation within a single framework. However, directly adapting such models to IIMT remains challenging. In particular, they often suffer from understanding-generation conflicts, where the translation inferred during understanding is inconsistent with the text supervision used in generation, and spatial position misalignment, where the rendered text does not accurately match the target text regions. To address these issues, we present UniTranslator, a unified multimodal framework for IIMT that tightly couples translation understanding and text editing. Specifically, we introduce an Understand-Generation Alignment Module (UGAM) to bridge the representation gap between understanding and generation, encouraging semantic consistency between translated content prediction and text rendering. We further propose a Spatial Mask Decoder (SMD) with pixel-level supervision over text regions to improve spatial grounding, geometric alignment, and layout controllability during generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniTranslator achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse language directions and complex real-world layouts. Moreover, our results reveal a strong mutual reinforcement effect between translation understanding and image generation, highlighting the advantage of unified translation multimodal learning. Code is available at https://github.com/SeerRay-Lab/Unitranslator.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2605.00327

DynamicPO: Dynamic Preference Optimization for Recommendation

Authors:

Xingyu Hu↗Kai Zhang↗Jiancan Wu↗Shuli Wang↗Chi Wang↗Wenshuai Chen↗Yinhua Zhu↗Haitao Wang↗Xingxing Wang↗Xiang Wang↗

arXiv:2605.00327v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12988

A Machine Learning Framework for Real-Time Personalized Ergonomic Pose Analysis

Authors:

Manex Atxa↗Bruno Simoes↗Julen Balzategui↗

This paper introduces a new methodology for real-time prediction of ergonomic and non-ergonomic human poses using volumetric video data in three dimensions. Although the methodology was designed for ergonomic assessments, it can be adapted to other applications requiring real-time analysis of human posture. One aspect that makes this system stand out is its ability to analyze 3D point clouds during the assessment, enabling computation from multiple angles. This overcomes a critical limitation of cameras which provide often a fixed viewpoint, thereby restricting the data available for a thorough postural evaluation, especially when occlusions occur. The system continuously and automatically performs pose inference using the chosen perspective on the real-time streaming data; however, only the poses manually selected and labeled by the user are used to train the personalized deep learning classifier. The methodology has been refined through a case study in which RGB-D cameras captured subjects performing load-lifting tasks, enabling real-time skeletal labeling. The model was trained on this data and, following the training phase, performs inference on new streaming data in real time. This research offers a scalable and pragmatic approach for real-time ergonomic evaluation by combining state-of-the-art 3D data technologies and traditional 2D pose estimation algorithms. It addresses the increasing need for safety and health monitoring in workplace environments, marking a notable contribution to the domain.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.29515

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

Authors:

David Gonzalez↗Alba Muixi↗Beatriz Moya↗Elias Cueto↗

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14022

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

Authors:

Yash Tomar↗Aryav Das↗

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17102

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

Authors:

Aoyu Zhang↗Dongping Liu↗Luyao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25 DOI: arXiv:2606.24964

Evidence for feature-specific error correction in LLMs

Authors:

Francisco Ferreira da Silva↗Stefan Heimersheim↗

arXiv:2606.24964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the features of large language models (LLMs) is a central goal of interpretability. LLMs are commonly assumed to use superposition to represent more features than they have dimensions. They may not only represent features in superposition but also perform computation in superposition. Theory predicts that computing in superposition requires error correction that privileges feature directions over generic ones, but this prediction has not been tested empirically. We propose an empirical test of error correction in LLMs based on activation perturbations. Perturbing residual-stream activations, we find that they are robust to small perturbations–forming activation plateaus consistent with error correction–but less robust along candidate feature directions ("pure" directions, constructed from contrastive prompt pairs) than along mixtures of two such directions, indicating that the pure directions are privileged. We quantify this privilegedness by modeling the perturbation effect as a function of the $L^p$-norm of its decomposition into feature components. For $p=2$ the response is a quadratic form with at most as many nonzero eigenvalues as the residual-stream dimension, which cannot privilege the many feature directions superposition requires. $p>2$ lifts this constraint and is consistent with feature-specific error correction. We find $p>2$ for contrastive, MELBO, and SAE-decoder directions, and $p\approx2$ for random and PCA directions (controls). These results replicate across Gemma-2-9B, Qwen3-1.7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, Aya-Expanse-8B, and Yi-1.5-9B. We further validate our method on a toy model of error correction with known ground-truth features, recovering $p>2$ for true feature directions, degrading toward $2$ as we rotate away from them.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2602.00945

Neural FOXP2 – Language Specific Neuron Steering for Targeted Language Improvement in LLMs

Authors:

Anusa Saha↗Tanmay Joshi↗Vinija Jain↗Aman Chadha↗Amitava Das↗

LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language defaultness is governed by a sparse, low-rank control circuit, language neurons, that can be mechanistically isolated and safely steered. We introduce Neural FOXP2, that makes a chosen language (Hindi or Spanish) primary in a model by steering language-specific neurons. Neural FOXP2 proceeds in three stages: (i) Localize: We train per-layer SAEs so each activation decomposes into a small set of active feature components. For every feature, we quantify English vs. Hindi/Spanish selectivity overall logit-mass lift toward the target-language token set. Tracing the top-ranked features back to their strongest contributing units yields a compact language-neuron set. (ii) Steering directions: We localize controllable language-shift geometry via a spectral low-rank analysis. For each layer, we build English to target activation-difference matrices and perform layerwise SVD to extract the dominant singular directions governing language change. The eigengap and effective-rank spectra identify a compact steering subspace and an empirically chosen intervention window (where these directions are strongest and most stable). (iii) Steer: We apply a signed, sparse activation shift targeted to the language neurons. Concretely, within low to mid layers we add a positive steering along the target-language dominant directions and a compensating negative shift toward the null space for the English neurons, yielding controllable target-language defaultness.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16900

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

Authors:

Hao Tang↗Yuechen Duan↗Jiongyu Zhu↗Zimeng Feng↗Hao Li↗Chao Li↗

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19984

Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing

Authors:

Juntian Huang↗Jurgen Kurths↗Ying Tang↗

arXiv:2606.19984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses trainable reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next-generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, enabling efficient and high-fidelity dynamical system forecasting.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15874

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

Authors:

Junjia Qi↗Zichuan Fu↗Jingtong Gao↗Wenlin Zhang↗Hanyu Yan↗Xian Wu↗Xiangyu Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2601.02893

Trading symmetry for Hilbert-space dimension in Bell-inequality violation

Authors:

Hsin-Yu Hsu↗Gelo Noel M. Tabia↗Kai-Siang Chen↗Mu-En Liu↗Tam\'as V\'ertesi↗Nicolas Brunner↗Yeong-Cherng Liang↗

arXiv:2601.02893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information, asymmetry, i.e., the lack of symmetry, is a resource allowing one to accomplish certain tasks that are otherwise impossible. Similarly, in a Bell test using any given Bell inequality, the maximum violation achievable using quantum strategies respecting or disregarding a certain symmetry can be different. In this work, we focus on the symmetry involved in the exchange of parties and explore when we have to trade this symmetry for a lower-dimensional quantum strategy in achieving the maximal violation of given Bell inequalities. For the family of symmetric Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequalities, we provide evidence showing that there is no such trade-off. However, for several other Bell inequalities with a small number of dichotomic measurement settings, we show that symmetric quantum strategies in the minimal Hilbert space dimension can only lead to a suboptimal Bell violation. In other words, there exist symmetric Bell inequalities that can only be maximally violated by asymmetric quantum strategies of minimal dimension. In contrast, one can also find examples of asymmetric Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by symmetric correlations. The implications of these findings on the geometry of the set of quantum correlations and the possibility of performing self-testing therefrom are briefly discussed.

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14.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2402.18999

Mixing Times for the Facilitated Exclusion Process

Authors:

James Ayre↗Paul Chleboun↗

arXiv:2402.18999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The facilitated simple exclusion process (FEP) is a one-dimensional exclusion process with a dynamical constraint. We establish bounds on the mixing time of the FEP on the segment, with closed boundaries, and the circle. The FEP on these spaces exhibits transient states that, if the macroscopic density of particles is at least $1/2$, the process will eventually exit to reach an ergodic component. If the macroscopic density is less than $1/2$ the process will hit an absorbing state. We show that the symmetric FEP (SFEP) on the segment $\{1,\ldots,N\}$, with $k>N/2$ particles, has mixing time of order $N^{2}\log(N-k)$ and exhibits the pre-cutoff phenomenon. For the asymmetric FEP (AFEP) on the segment, we show that there exists initial conditions for which the hitting time of the ergodic component is exponentially slow in the number of holes $N-k$. In particular, when $N-k$ is large enough, the hitting time of the ergodic component determines the mixing time. For the SFEP on the circle of size $N$, and macroscopic particle density $\rho \in(1/2,1)$, we establish bounds on the mixing time of order $N^{2}\log N$ for the process restricted to its ergodic component. We also give an upper bound on the hitting time of the ergodic component of order $N^{2}\log N$ for a large class of initial conditions. The proofs rely on couplings with exclusion processes (both open and closed boundaries) via a novel lattice path (height function) construction of the FEP.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.20718

Frequency-Division Multiplexed CV-QKD System

Authors:

Jaehyeok Han↗Donghyeok Le↗Minseok Ryu↗Syed Assad↗Yong-Su Kim↗Sunghyun Bae↗

arXiv:2603.20718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system with enhanced spectral efficiency through optimized channel spacing of low-symbol-rate signals. A four-channel 10-Mbaud FDM-CV-QKD system was experimentally demonstrated using Gaussian modulation, a transmitted local oscillator, and homodyne detection. Despite the inter-channel interference, under a finite-size scenario (m=1.25x10^6), the system achieved a 3.6-fold back-to-back secret key rate gain and outperformed the single-channel frequency-upconverted signal up to 26.8 km.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2603.02234

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

Authors:

Davide Ferre'↗Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire↗Frederik Mallmann-Trenn↗Emanuele Natale↗

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.07537

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

Authors:

Md. Rejaul Korim Sadi↗Toufiqur Rahman Tasin↗Golam Mostofa Naeem↗

arXiv:2606.07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate–producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs–with a consistency that persists across generations and scales. Existing taxonomies classify hallucination by output type, distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic failures and faithfulness from factuality divergence. These frameworks are descriptively rigorous but do not identify which internal mechanism produced a given instance. This paper analyses hallucination as a structural consequence of three architectural decisions that together form a compound failure system. Self-attention's co-occurrence learning substitutes statistical proximity for semantic meaning and produces entity confusion, fact misattribution, and semantic drift. The maximum likelihood estimation training objective optimises next-token probability without factual constraint, rewarding statistically plausible outputs regardless of their truth value. Autoregressive decoding's permanent left-to-right commitment under exposure bias ensures that a single wrong token cascades forward through the entire output sequence without revision. Dataset pathologies–long-tail deficiencies, training bias, and synthetic pollution–amplify these vulnerabilities but do not independently cause them. We make three contributions. First, we map each mechanism to a specific output category in the Alansari and Luqman taxonomy, locating intrinsic hallucination in self-attention, extrinsic hallucination in MLE, and logical inconsistency in autoregressive decoding. Second, we show that each commonly cited dataset pathology exploits one of these mechanisms rather than originating hallucination independently. Third, we identify the diagnostic limitation of output-type-only classification and contrast it with inference-layer mitigation approaches.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11516

Single Photon Cross-Phase Shifts Can Be Enhanced by Localization in both Frequency and Time

Authors:

Xinyu Jiao↗Vida-Michelle Nixon↗Kyle Thompson↗Aephraim Steinberg↗

arXiv:2606.11516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon optical nonlinearities face a fundamental trade-off: maximum nonlinearity requires both spectral resonance (narrow bandwidth) and high peak intensity (short duration), constraints that are incompatible due to the time-energy uncertainty relation. We demonstrate experimentally that this limitation does not need to exist in cases involving post-selection. We measure a cross-phase shift (XPS) produced by a resonant photon from a narrow-band source that is first transmitted through a cold atomic cloud and then localized in time through detection. The peak size of this XPS is greatly enhanced compared to that of Gaussian single-photon-level pulses without post-selection, benefiting from the narrow bandwidth of the resonant prepared state and the high intensity of the post-selected state simultaneously. We measure enhancements in the peak XPS of 6$\pm$1 at an optical depth (OD) of 2.4$\pm$0.1, and our results are in qualitative agreement across a range of optical depths with the recently developed weak value theory of atomic excitation [Thompson et al., APL Quantum 2, 036108 (2025)] for such post-selected photons. This work uncovers new consequences of having simultaneous knowledge of frequency and time, raising new foundational questions about how a particle behaves, and interacts with other systems, when its preparation and post-selection are non-commuting.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14648

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

Authors:

Pedro Chumpitaz-Flores↗My Duong↗Juan S. Borrero↗Kaixun Hua↗

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2405.15768

Canonical Variates in Wasserstein Metric Space

Authors:

Jia Li↗Lin Lin↗

arXiv:2405.15768v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we address the classification of instances represented by distributions on a vector space rather than single points. We consider classification algorithms based on pairwise distances, specifically, the Wasserstein metric between distributions. Central to our investigation is dimension reduction within the Wasserstein metric space to enhance classification accuracy. We introduce a novel approach grounded in the principle of maximizing Fisher's ratio, defined as the quotient of between-class variation to within-class variation. The directions in which this ratio is maximized are termed discriminant coordinates or canonical variates axes. In practice, both between-class and within-class variations are defined as the average squared Wasserstein distances between pairs of distributions, with the pairs either belonging to the same class or to different classes. This ratio optimization is achieved through an iterative algorithm, which alternates between optimal transport and maximization steps within the vector space. Empirical studies are conducted to assess the algorithm's convergence; and experimental results demonstrate that the dimension reduction technique substantially enhances classification performance. Moreover, the new method outperforms well-established algorithms that operate on vector representations derived from distributional data. It also exhibits robustness to variations in how instances are summarized by distributions, such as the number of components in a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) representation.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.00730

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

Authors:

Ricardo Hidalgo-Arag\'on↗Jes\'us M. Gonz\'alez-Barahona↗Gregorio Robles↗

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11576

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Authors:

Ahmadreza Jeddi↗Minh Ngoc Le↗Amirhossein Kazerouni↗Hakki Can Karaimer↗Hue Nguyen↗Iqbal Mohomed↗Michael Brudno↗Alex Levinshtein↗Konstantinos G. Derpanis↗Babak Taati↗Radek Grzeszczuk↗

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

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23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24619

When CQs Go Wrong: Challenges in CQ Verification with OE-Assist

Authors:

Anna Sofia Lippolis↗Mohammad Javad Saeedizade↗Robin Keskis\"arkk\"a↗Aldo Gangemi↗Eva Blomqvist↗Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese↗

arXiv:2606.24619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Competency Questions (CQs) are the central component of CQ-verification, an established process in which an ontology is evaluated against a set of natural language questions to determine whether the intended purpose of the ontology has been properly modelled. However, CQ-verification is often time-consuming and error-prone, as it requires careful interpretation of linguistic nuances and precise alignment with formal ontology constructs. Ambiguities and complexity in CQs can further complicate this process, leading to inconsistent modelling decisions and verification outcomes. In this paper, we investigate what makes a CQ challenging and possible solutions to enhance the users' performance in the CQ-verification process. We experimented with the data of 19 participants who performed CQ-verification on 20 tasks using an LLM assistant to support ontology evaluation. The results show the necessity of a tool to refine CQs before publishing them to avoid ambiguity or excessive complexity in later phases of the ontology engineering process.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13348

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

Authors:

Micaela Vaucher↗Santiago Silveira↗Santiago G\'ongora↗Luis Chiruzzo↗

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions–setting and character creation, puzzle design–to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14335

Recovery thresholds for hidden weighted sparse graphs

Authors:

Zhe Hou↗Jingcheng Liu↗

arXiv:2606.14335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering structural information from noisy high-dimensional data is a fundamental task in statistical inference. We investigate the recovery thresholds for a graph hidden in a randomly weighted complete graph. Specifically, an unknown graph $H^* \in H_n$ is chosen uniformly at random, and hidden in a complete graph of $n$ vertices as follows: the weight of an edge $e \in H$ is distributed independently according to $P_n$; otherwise the weight is distributed independently according to $Q_n$. The goal is to recover almost all of $H$ from these edge weights. Assuming a local Lipschitzness of the Rényi divergence between distributions $P_n$ and $Q_n$, and a mild density condition for the graphs $H_n$, we give a unified characterization of the information-theoretic limit for recovering almost all of $H$ (also known as almost exact recovery). Our characterization connects the KL divergence between $P_n$ and $Q_n$ to the logarithm of the first moment threshold of $H$ in the Erdős-Rényi random graph model $G(n,p)$. Our lower bound also extends to the task of partial recovery, in which only a constant $\lambda$-fraction of $H$ needs to be recovered. Last but not least, for certain Bernoulli and Exponential regimes, and for Gaussian distributions, we are able to show an All-or-Nothing (AoN) threshold phenomenon at the exponential scale.

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