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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Membership Inference Attacks against Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.28378v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first systematic Membership Inference Attack (MIA) evaluation of LALMs. Using Multi-modal Blind Baselines based on textual, spectral and prosodic features, we demonstrate that common audio datasets exhibit near-perfect train/test separability (AUC ~ 1.0) even without model inference, thus MIA may primarily detect distribution shift. We therefore introduce a blind-baseline protocol to control for this confound. Under this protocol, we identify that the distribution-matched datasets enable reliable MIA evaluation without distribution-shift artifacts. We benchmark multiple MIA methods and conduct modality disentanglement experiments on these datasets. The results reveal that LALM memorization is cross-modal, arising only from binding a speaker's vocal identity with its text. These findings establish a principled standard for auditing LALMs beyond spurious correlations. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/snooow1029/ALM_MIA.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Adversarial dynamical systems characterize when data-driven learning succeeds or fails

arXiv:2407.06312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many systems resist analytical modeling, making data-driven inference of dynamics important. Yet data-driven methods can fail to converge or generalize, leaving open a central question: When can system behavior be learned reliably from data, and when is such learning impossible? We answer this question using adversarial dynamical systems to identify the boundary between accessible and inaccessible regimes. In Koopman operator learning, a leading framework for representing nonlinear dynamics through linear spectral objects, we design optimal data-driven spectral algorithms with convergence and certification guarantees under conditions arising broadly in physical systems. This yields a convergence theory for Koopman-operator approximations and resolves a longstanding open problem in Koopman spectral analysis. Conversely, by constructing adversarial systems, we prove matching impossibility results: without these conditions, no single-sequence limiting procedure can guarantee learning, regardless of data quality. These results sharply characterize when data-driven spectral learning can succeed and when it must fail. We validate the framework on oscillators, chaotic fluid flows and Arctic sea ice concentration forecasting. In the latter, we uncover hidden modes of Arctic sea ice decline, deliver long-range forecasts with geographic error bounds, and outperform state-of-the-art dynamical and deep learning models at substantially lower computational cost, enabling real-time deployment on standard CPUs.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network Algorithm for Many-Body Trace Norms

arXiv:2606.11882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trace norms are fundamental to quantum information theory, yet in many-body systems their evaluation remains a major computational bottleneck, as it generally requires diagonalizing exponentially large operators. Here, we overcome this bottleneck by introducing a controlled tensor-network algorithm for estimating the trace norm of matrix product operators without full diagonalization. The key idea is to combine Zolotarev's rational approximation to the sign function with a variational formulation solved using a density-matrix-renormalization-group-like algorithm. The resulting approximation is systematically improvable, with its accuracy controlled by the rational approximation parameters and the spectral weight near zero. Beyond the reach of exact diagonalization, we demonstrate controlled trace-norm calculations for entanglement negativity, quantum fidelity and quantum Fisher information, achieving substantially improved accuracy over polynomial-based Lanczos approaches. Our results establish trace-norm-based quantities as practical tensor-network observables, opening a route toward tensor-network studies of quantum information in mixed states.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coarse-grained quantum thermodynamics: Observation-dependent quantities, observation-independent laws

arXiv:2507.15918v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In both classical and quantum thermodynamics, physical quantities are typically assigned objective values defined independently of our observations. We then refer to the 'work performed by a gas', or the 'entropy of the gas', regardless of how they are evaluated. Here, we question this conception in the context of quantum thermodynamics, estimating how the definition of pivotal thermodynamic quantities is affected by experimental instruments of limited precision. We find that the coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities frequently lead to different conclusions from those drawn in fine-grained scenarios. For instance, the irreversibility of a process, or its work payoff, can significantly vary with the instrument precision. We show nonetheless that coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities satisfy the same relations (i.e., the second law inequality, the relation between dissipation and distinguishability of a process from its time-reverse, and the quantum work fluctuation theorems) as their fine-grained counterparts. These results highlight the observation-independence of relations linking thermodynamic quantities which are themselves observation-dependent.

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

AI Contagion in Social Networks

arXiv:2606.15206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while receiving AI-generated content, and AI systems retrain on the aggregate social information they influence. This interaction generates two feedback forces: an AI contagion channel, through which distortions diffuse across the network, and an AI social distortion multiplier, through which retraining amplifies past errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the environment, we show that the long-run behavior of the system admits a two-dimensional representation whose spectral radius determines whether AI-mediated information systems are dynamically stable or unstable. We characterize a sharp regulatory frontier identifying the minimum filtering required for stability and show how network topology shapes systemic informational risk.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Silent Manipulation of Mental Health Treatment Recommendations from a Large Language Model

Authors:

Importance. Large language models (LLMs) increasingly inform mental health decisions by patients and clinicians. Inference-time activation steering can shift model behavior on a target dimension without altering weights or prompts and without disclosure to users, allowing treatment recommendations to be silently changed for commercial or ideological reasons. Objective. To determine whether directional activation steering can shift an open-weights LLM's depression treatment recommendations. Design, Setting, and Participants. This non-human subjects study applied directional activation steering to an open-weights LLM (DeepSeek V4 Flash) responding to 12 depression-advice scenarios (4 favoring medication, 4 favoring avoidance, 4 neutral), generated at 30 amplitudes from -1.5 to +1.5 in 0.1 increments plus an unsteered baseline. Exposures. A single steering direction contrasting antidepressant medication with self-directed approaches (diet, exercise, meditation, dietary supplements), constructed from 16 paired training prompts and applied at the attention output of every transformer block; weights and system prompt were held constant. Main Outcomes and Measures. The extent to which medication and four self-care categories were addressed, scored 0 to 3 by a human-validated LLM rater (Claude Opus 4.7), the medication-versus-self-care balance, and clinician referral, estimated per unit of amplitude using mixed-effects models with a scenario random intercept. Results. Across 372 generations, steering produced a graded, dose-dependent shift in the medication-versus-self-care balance, which declined by 0.32 per unit of amplitude (beta=-0.32; 95% CI, -0.39 to -0.25; P < .001); medication extent fell and self-care extent rose. The shift was largest for scenarios with no stated treatment preference (beta = -0.44; 95% CI, -0.54 to -0.34; P < .001). A clinician referral appeared in 322 of 372 responses (87%) and did not vary with steering amplitude (P = .63). Conclusions and Relevance. In this open-weights LLM providing depression treatment information, inference-time activation steering shifted treatment recommendations without altering weights, prompt structure, or safety outputs, with the largest effect among users expressing no treatment preference. These findings suggest a need for LLM disclosure standards and independent auditing as such models inform clinical decisions.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation

arXiv:2606.24450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perceiving physical contact is fundamental to dexterous manipulation. While robots often rely on dedicated hardware tactile sensors, humans exhibit a remarkable ability to infer contact by integrating visual information with an innate sense of their body's pose and movement. Inspired by this embodied perceptual skill, we investigate whether a robot can learn to infer contact from vision, an approach that also offers a scalable alternative to tactile hardware specifically for binary contact estimation, which faces practical challenges in cost, fragility, and integration. We present NoContactNoWorries, a transformer-based multimodal framework that fuses RGB-D vision with the robot's proprioception to infer binary contact states as a pseudo-tactile signal for hand-object interactions. We validate by training a single contact prediction model on multiple objects and show that the inferred contact signal supports downstream reinforcement learning agents for in-hand object reorientation, generalizing to novel objects. Experiments in both simulation and on a real-world robot validate our approach, highlighting the feasibility of inferring contact from vision and proprioception. Project Page: https://soham2560.github.io/no-contact-no-worries/

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Formalize Once, Edit the Rest: Efficient Lean-Based Answer Selection for Math Reasoning

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

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

Learning Dynamics Reveal a Hierarchy of Weight-Induced Layerwise Gram Metrics

arXiv:2606.09744v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study feed-forward ReLU networks with fixed readout and quadratic loss. The aim is to rewrite gradient descent not primarily as a dynamics in weight space, but as a collective dynamics closed in terms of fields defined on the training-set space. For a single hidden layer, the weight variables can be eliminated from the activation dynamics, yielding a closed equation for the residuals governed by a collective kernel that factorizes into an input-geometric matrix and a dynamical co-activation matrix. For deeper networks, the residual dynamics retains a clean layer-wise kernel structure. However, from depth three onward, closure requires a hierarchy of weight-induced Gram operators that mediate information transport across layers. Moreover, the conjugate-field dynamics is governed by operators satisfying a backward pullback recursion, of which the weight-induced Gram operators are the first nontrivial instances.

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

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.

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

The Critical Role of Model Selection in Causal Inference: A Comparative Analysis of Classification Models within the InferBERT Framework for Pharmacovigilance

Distinguishing causal adverse drug events (ADEs) from spurious correlations remains a central challenge in pharmacovigilance. The InferBERT framework integrates transformer models with Do-calculus, but its success hinges on the underlying classification model. This study evaluates the impact of model choice in InferBERT, assessing whether simpler models suffice, if domain-specific pre-training helps, whether scaling to LLMs improves causal detection, and the effect of post-hoc calibration. We performed a comparative study on two benchmarks: Analgesics-induced Acute Liver Failure (AILF) and Tramadol-related Mortalities (TRAM). Four models were evaluated-XGBoost (baseline), ALBERT (original InferBERT), BioBERT (biomedical transformer), and Med-LLaMA (medical LLM)-using 5-fold cross-validation repeated over 20 runs. We measured accuracy, Expected Calibration Error (ECE) pre- and post-isotonic regression, and Jaccard concordance of causal terms with PRR, ROR, and EBGM; significance was tested with paired t-tests. BioBERT achieved the highest accuracy on both datasets, while Med-LLaMA underperformed despite its size and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Domain-specific pre-training was decisive. Calibration improved ECE but had mixed effects on accuracy and causal discovery. BioBERT's superiority also yielded the strongest concordance with traditional pharmacovigilance signals. These results show that domain-specific pre-training provides a clear advantage over simpler baselines and larger LLMs. Investing in manageable, domain-aware models is more effective for computational pharmacovigilance than simply scaling model size.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Machine-Learning Emulation of Satellite Greenhouse Gas Retrievals: Stability over Time

arXiv:2606.09313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval algorithms are used to estimate atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), by solving inverse problems from high-spectral-resolution satellite radiance measurements. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, which makes real-time estimation at scale difficult. Machine-learning models have therefore been proposed as fast emulators of retrieval algorithms. Most existing studies, however, evaluate them only on test data from the same period as the training data. We study the stability over time of such emulators using data from the Greenhouse Gases Observing SATellite (GOSAT). We show that prediction accuracy generally deteriorates when the test period moves away from the training period. We also show that including time as an input feature substantially improves XCH4 prediction for Lasso and neural-network models. Among the methods considered, a simple Lasso model performs as well as or better than more complex methods such as neural networks, and yields more stable predictions over time. We further validate the results using the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON), a ground-based observation network. On the TCCON-matched dataset, the time-augmented Lasso achieves errors against TCCON that are comparable to the disagreement between GOSAT and TCCON for both XCO2 and XCH4.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Conditionally Poissonian random digraphs

arXiv:1705.03801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We define a Poissonian model of directed random graphs which generalises the undirected Poissonian random graph process introduced by Norros and Reittu in Adv. Appl. Probab. 38 (2006), 59–75. Its loopless simple projection is a rank-one independent-arc inhomogeneous digraph of the type studied by Cao and Olvera-Cravioto, Random Struct. Alg. 56 (2020), 722–774. For the Poissonian multigraph itself, we discuss the relation to Norros-Reittu graphs, characterise limiting degree distributions, and record explicit exploration estimates. In particular, we give fixed-depth directed local weak limits, stopped branching-process couplings with weight-mass collision budgets, a comparison with the simple projection, and a rare-event concentration criterion. These estimates are intended as graph-side structural inputs for later dynamics on the graph.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

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

Towards Data-free and Training-free Compression for Speech Foundation Models Using Parameter Clustering

arXiv:2606.11836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a novel data-free and training-free compression approach for speech foundation models using channelwise clustering via k-means. More fine-grained, mixed sparsity pruning by layer-level varying number of parameter clusters is also explored. Experiments conducted on the LibriSpeech dataset suggest that when operating with pruning sparsity of 50% on HuBERT-large, consistent WER reductions of 27.73%/18.61% absolute (34.37%/21.91% relative) over the magnitude-based pruning were obtained on the test-clean and test-other subsets before fine-tuning and 0.19%/0.79% absolute (3.36%/4.62% relative) after fine-tuning with only 3 epochs. Similar WER reductions of 2.86%/5.02% absolute (59.21%/55.29% relative) were observed against magnitudebased pruning on Whisper-large-v3 at 10% sparsity, all with no significant WER increase relative to the uncompressed baseline.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Design and Scheduling of an AI-based Queueing System

arXiv:2406.06855v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To leverage prediction models to make optimal scheduling decisions in service systems, we must understand how predictive errors impact congestion due to externalities on the delay of other jobs. Motivated by applications where prediction models interact with human servers (e.g., content moderation), we consider a large queueing system comprising of many single server queues where the class of a job is estimated using a prediction model. By characterizing the impact of mispredictions on congestion cost in heavy traffic, we design an index-based policy that incorporates the predicted class information in a near-optimal manner. Our theoretical results guide the design of predictive models by providing a simple model selection procedure with downstream queueing performance as a central concern, and offer novel insights on how to design queueing systems with AI-based triage. We illustrate our framework on a content moderation task based on real online comments, where we construct toxicity classifiers by finetuning large language models.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bayesian Conditional Priors

Multi-label recognition with frozen Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is brittle under distribution shift: standard zero-shot inference scores labels independently, ignoring co-occurrence structure and producing incoherent label sets where dominant concepts suppress weaker but compatible labels. We introduce Bayesian Conditional Priors (BCP) Estimation, a gradient-free test-time adaptation method that injects label dependency without tuning the backbone. BCP views zero-shot logits as a proxy for marginal posteriors under a fixed image-text likelihood and attributes shift-induced errors mainly to a mismatched label prior. For each test image, it selects a high-confidence anchor label and applies an anchor-conditioned Bayesian refinement. This update is closed-form in logit space and admits a pointwise mutual information (PMI) interpretation, explicitly promoting compatible labels and suppressing incompatible ones. BCP operates without target annotations by estimating anchor-conditioned priors online from the unlabeled test stream via lightweight second-order co-occurrence statistics, adding negligible overhead beyond a single forward pass. Across standard multi-label benchmarks and multiple CLIP backbones, BCP consistently outperforms strong TTA baselines, e.g., improving RN50 average mAP from 57.31 to 69.22 and ViT-B/16 from 62.61 to 71.79.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

From Period Finding to Lattice Sampling: Experimental Insights into Shor's and Regev's Factoring Algorithms

arXiv:2606.17647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms for integer factorization represent one of the most prominent applications of quantum computation, with far-reaching implications for modern cryptography. While Shor's algorithm provides a polynomial-time solution in the ideal quantum model, its practical implementation is severely constrained by the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These constraints have motivated the exploration of alternative factoring algorithms with different structural and resource trade-offs. In this work, we present an experimental study of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm, implemented on real quantum hardware, and compare its behavior with that of Shor's algorithm under analogous conditions. Focusing on the case N = 15, we execute both algorithms on the QMIO quantum computer at the Centro de Supercomputacion de Galicia (CESGA) and contrast the results with one of IBM's open-access quantum computers and ideal simulations. This parallel execution enables a low-level comparison of the two algorithms, highlighting how their respective quantum implementations interact with hardware noise, limited circuit depth, and finite sampling. Our analysis emphasizes the different ways in which Shor's and Regev's algorithms encode arithmetic structure into quantum states through Fourier sampling in one and higher dimensions, respectively, and how these differences manifest in experimental outcomes. Although neither algorithm demonstrates a practical advantage in the small N regime, the results provide insight into their relative robustness and failure modes on contemporary quantum devices. This study illustrates the value of experimental benchmarking of alternative quantum factoring algorithms as a means of understanding the practical implications of algorithmic design choices in the NISQ era.

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

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.