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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Schattor: Schatten-family methods for deep learning optimization

arXiv:2606.15702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning optimization features heterogeneous parameter structures, noisy gradients, and highly nonconvex landscapes, posing significant challenges for both algorithm design and theoretical analysis. Motivated by the limitations of SGD and the success of adaptive optimizers, we propose {\it Schattor}, a family of adaptive first-order methods based on Schatten norms. Schattor unifies SGD and the recently proposed matrix-variate adaptive optimizer Muon within a single Schatten-norm-based framework. We establish dimension-free stationarity guarantees for methods in the Schattor family for stochastic matrix optimization problems via a novel matrix martingale moment bound. We also develop multi-block extensions that adaptively balance block-wise optimization progress and prove dimension-free stationarity guarantees in this more general setting.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Systematic Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis for Video Place Recognition

The generation of synthetic novel views has the potential to positively impact robot navigation in several ways. In image-based navigation, a novel overhead view generated from a scene taken by a ground robot could be used to guide an aerial robot to that location. In Video Place Recognition (VPR), novel views of ground locations from the air can be added that enable a UAV to identify places seen by the ground robot, and similarly, overhead views can be used to generate novel ground views. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of synthetic novel views in VPR using five public VPR image databases and seven typical image similarity methods. We show that for small synthetic additions, novel views improve VPR recognition statistics. We find that for larger additions, the magnitude of viewpoint change is less important than the number of views added and the type of imagery in the dataset.

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

Mind the Gap: Diagnosing Constraint Discovery Failures in Text-in-Image Editing

作者:

A key challenge in multimodal reasoning is determining which visual dependencies become relevant under a specific task, rather than merely recognizing visible content. We study this through edit-induced constraint discovery in text-in-image editing, a controlled diagnostic setting where a local text change can activate secondary consistency constraints: given a valid editing instruction and an image, can a model identify the secondary regions that must also change? Across 461 diagnostic cases, four MLLMs, and 19 constraint subtypes, models recover only 46% case-level macro recall under unguided prompting versus 94% when constraints are explicitly provided, suggesting that a substantial portion of the failure arises when models must decide which unstated dependencies to surface. Oracle-field decomposition shows that case-specific causal explanations are the most effective partial guidance (0.782 recall), above region names (0.610) or type labels (0.646), suggesting that edit-specific causal cues account for much of the oracle gain. A downstream experiment further shows that higher self-discovery recall does not necessarily improve task performance: unverified self-discovery introduces false positives that offset recall gains, motivating precision-aware constraint elicitation.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

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

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cardiometabolic risk phenogroups from a data-driven classification with expanded risk factors

Background and Aims Current diagnostic criteria for metabolic syndrome (MetS) may inadequately capture underlying metabolic heterogeneity and associated cardiovascular risks. We aimed to use expanded cardiometabolic variables to identify new cardiometabolic phenogroups with relevance to prognosis and risk stratification. Methods Latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to a discovery cohort (RESET; n=1,034), using the six conventional MetS measures and eight additional variables. A decision tree model was constructed using the most important variables to enable practical phenogroup classification and facilitate external validation. External validation was conducted in three independent cohorts, PICMAN (n = 120), UK Biobank (n = 344,817), and CHARLS (n = 12,145), analysing for proteomic signatures and cardiovascular outcomes. Results Five latent phenogroups were identified in the discovery cohort: Metabolically Preserved with and without isolated hypertension (each n=244; 23.6%), Lean-Insulin Resistant (IR) (n=140; 13.5%), Obese-Insulin Sensitive (IS) (n=211; 20.4%), and Obese-IR (n=195; 18.9%). Lean-IR and Obese-IS showed discordant adiposity and insulin/glycemic status, and a low prevalence of MetS (21.4% and 31.3%, respectively), whereas MetS was high (75.9%) only in the Obese-IR group. A decision tree model using four binary indicators (visceral adiposity, IR, elevated SBP, and HbA1c) accurately classified individuals into the five latent phenogroups and was subsequently deployed for external validation. Validation in PICMAN showed significantly higher liver fat (Mean 9.0% [SD 6.3%]) in Lean-IR versus Metabolically Preserved (Mean 2.8% [SD 1.8%], P=0.002). Plasma proteomic analyses further reflected unique metabolic-inflammation signatures across the 5 groups. Validation in the UK Biobank showed significant association between the latent phenogroups with outcomes of myocardial infarction and stroke. Hazard ratios for the composite outcome after adjusting for age and sex were 1.52 (95% CI, 1.43-1.61) for isolated hypertension, 1.86 (1.75-1.98) for Lean-IR, 1.85 (1.75-1.97) for Obese-IS, and 2.75 (2.56-2.95) for Obese-IR, compared with the Metabolically Preserved group. Conclusion Expanded cardiometabolic risk factors reveal metabolic heterogeneity obscured by current MetS criteria. Incorporating visceral adiposity and IR into a novel classification system refines cardiovascular risk stratification for the management of cardiometabolic disease.

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

p-PSO: A Penalized Particle Swarm Optimization Technique for Finding D-Optimal Designs with Mixed Factors in Generalized Linear Models

arXiv:2606.15962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding D-optimal designs for generalized linear models (GLMs) is challenging due to the dependence of the Fisher information matrix on unknown parameters and the lack of closed-form solutions, particularly when input factors include both discrete and continuous variables. Although classical algorithms and recent metaheuristic approaches have offered partial solutions, there remains a need for robust and computationally efficient methods. In this paper, we propose a penalized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, named $p$-PSO. Here we introduce a new, general-purpose penalty formulation for constrained optimization and demonstrate its effectiveness in optimal design problems. The formulation is algorithm-agnostic and applicable to a broad class of black-box optimization methods. Results show that the method is highly efficient, with its primary contribution being a penalty formulation that enables the direct use of an off-the-shelf PSO algorithm and extends naturally to more general constrained optimization tasks.

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

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHILLGuard: a dedicated Chinese LLM content safety guardrail. To address the critical scarcity of high-quality annotated Chinese safety data, we propose a scalable multi-stage data construction pipeline: we expand multi-source corpus via retrieval-augmented generation, generate implicit harmful samples through prompt engineering rewriting, and refine high-quality data via multi-model voting-based label calibration. Based on this, we build CHILLGuardTrain, a large-scale training set with 405,007 samples, and CHILLGuardTest, a rigorously curated annotated test set with 51,745 samples. We then train CHILLGuard on CHILLGuardTrain under a generator-classifier collaborative framework via Model-aware Direct Preference Optimization. Extensive experiments under multiple settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CHILLGuard, e.g., a 15.92% improvement of F1 score over Qwen3Guard-8B-Strict on our benchmark. We will release our resources at https://github.com/cswbyu/CHILLGuard.

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

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2511.07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ReM-MoA: Reasoning Memory Sustains Mixture-of-Agents Scaling

arXiv:2606.24437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) architectures improve inference-time scaling by organizing multiple LLM agents into layered reasoning pipelines. However, existing MoA variants fail to sustain gains as depth increases, exhibiting degradation, early plateauing, or saturation. We propose ReM-MoA, a memory-augmented MoA framework that sustains scaling through two mechanisms: (1) a Ranked Reasoning Memory that persistently stores and ranks reasoning traces from all layers using a comparative Reviewer Agent, and (2) a Curated Diversified Memory Routing scheme that exposes different agents to distinct combinations of successful and failed traces, preserving exploration diversity while propagating high-quality reasoning. We further introduce an optional multi-domain Reviewer distillation pipeline that improves ranking quality through frontier-model supervision. Across five reasoning benchmarks spanning math, formal logic, code, knowledge, and commonsense, ReM-MoA consistently outperforms prior MoA variants across both depth and width scaling, and its advantage widens with depth, establishing structured cross-layer reasoning memory as a key missing mechanism for scalable multi-agent inference.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ReAge3D: Re-Aging 3D Faces with View Consistency

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Matrix-product state skeletons in Onsager-integrable quantum chains

arXiv:2511.07212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Matrix-product state (MPS) skeletons are connected networks of Hamiltonians with exact MPS ground states that underlie a phase diagram. Such skeletons have previously been found in classes of free-fermion models. For the translation-invariant BDI and AIII free-fermion classes, it has been shown that the underlying skeleton is dense, giving an analytic approach to MPS approximation of ground states anywhere in the class. In this paper, we partially expose the skeleton in certain interacting spin chains: the $N$-state Onsager-integrable chiral clock families. We construct MPS that form a dense MPS skeleton in the gapped regions surrounding a sequence of fixed-point Hamiltonians (the generators of the Onsager algebra). Outside these gapped regions, these MPS remain eigenstates, but no longer give the many-body ground state. Rather, they are ground states in particular sectors of the spectrum. Our methods also allow us to find further MPS eigenstates; these correspond to low-lying excited states within the aforementioned gapped regions. This set of MPS excited states goes beyond the previous analysis of ground states on the $N=2$ free-fermion MPS skeleton. As an application of our results, we find a closed form for the disorder parameter in a family of interacting models. Finally, we remark that many of our results use only the Onsager algebra and are not specific to the chiral clock model representation.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

RNabel-A Standalone Software Tool for Annotating Tandem Mass Spectra of Modified Ribonucleic Acids

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) modifications, with over 170 identified types, play diverse roles in cellular processes. The past decade has witnessed surging demand for accurate identification and localization of RNA modifications in both endogenous and synthetic therapeutic RNAs. With accurate spectral annotation for RNA, tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) can meet this demand. Here we present RNabel, a user-friendly software tool for in-depth annotation of MS/MS spectra of RNA oligonucleotides. RNabel considers a full set of backbone-cleavage ions (a, b, c, d, a-B, w, x, y, z) in which the ribonucleotide unit could be A, U, C, G, Y (pseudouridine), or I (Inosine). Additionally, RNabel considers 196 modifications on the base, the phosphoribose linkage, the 5' or the 3' terminus, or detachment of a sub-nucleotide fragment as a neutral or charged group. Users can create new components if needed, including ribonucleotides, modifications, neutral or charged groups that could detach from a ribonucleotide. RNabel efficiently processes large datasets in four acceptable formats including .mgf, .raw, .txt from msConvert, and RNabel batch files. Multiple statistical metrics are provided for quality assessment of spectral annotation. To accelerate RNA modification analysis, RNabel is made freely available for Mac and Windows users at https://github.com/songge1111/RNabel/releases.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adherence to Red Reflex and Vision Screening Recommendations: A Deep Dive into Primary Care Implementation Gaps

Introduction: Early childhood vision screening is critical for detecting amblyopia and other vision-threatening conditions. Despite screening recommendations during well-child visits, rates remain low. Red reflex assessment is recommended to identify serious ocular pathology, yet its use in primary care is not well described. We examined rates and drivers of vision screening in pediatric primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records for children 3 to 5 years attending well-child visits in 2022 in one of three representative primary care clinics within a university health system. Outcomes were documented red reflex and functional vision tests. We evaluated associations with patient demographics and clinic site using multivariable logistic regression Results: Among 1,003 visits, 21.1% (n=212) had a documented red reflex assessment, and 60.8% (n=610) a functional vision test. Younger children (ages 3 and 4 vs. 5 years) had higher odds of red reflex assessment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 9.00 and 8.64], and lower odds of a functional vision (aOR 0.47 and 0.59) test. Females had higher odds of red reflex assessment (aOR 1.53). Other/Multiracial children had lower odds of red reflex assessment than Non-Hispanic White children (aOR 0.48). Screening rates varied significantly by clinic site Conclusions: Visual function and red reflex assessment are inconsistently performed in pediatric primary care, with particularly low rates of red reflex documentation. Screening rates varied between clinics and were affected by age. These findings highlight missed opportunities for early detection of vision-threatening conditions and identify targets for improving adherence to pediatric vision screening recommendations

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

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

Minimal Filling Architectures of Polynomial Neural Networks: Counterexamples, Frontier Search, and Defects

arXiv:2605.09609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide counterexamples to the unimodal minimal filling architecture conjecture for polynomial neural networks (PNNs) with power activation functions. Fixing the input and output widths, the conjecture states that any minimal filling architecture has unimodal widths for the hidden layers. We found counterexamples via a frontier search, recursive dimension bounds on neurovarieties, and symbolic computation. Notably, several subarchitectures of our main example exhibit large defect, in contrast with the predominantly small-defect behavior observed in prior literature.

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

ToolChain-CRC: Conformal Risk Control for Agentic AI Under Retrieval and Tool-Use Drift

arXiv:2606.18467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agents retrieve documents, call tools, check intermediate information, and then produce a final answer or action. This creates a risk-control problem that is not visible from the final answer alone. A final response may look acceptable even when the retrieval was weak, a tool output was wrong, or an earlier step was unsupported. We propose ToolChain-CRC, a conformal risk-control method for retrieval-augmented and tool-using agents under drift. The method treats each agent run as a full trajectory of actions, observations, and final output. It builds step-level risk scores, combines them into a trajectory risk score, calibrates an accept-or-intervene rule, and adds an anytime alarm that can stop risky runs before the final answer. We prove trajectory-level risk control under exchangeable calibration runs, give a drift-aware extension with auditable constants, and prove an anytime escalation rule through a supermartingale construction. Experiments cover synthetic tool-chain drift, RAG/tool-use stress tests, public SQuAD-derived retrieval tasks, an API-free agentic QA case study, ablations, target-risk sensitivity checks, 20-seed robustness checks, a drift-margin audit, and a live RAG/tool-use agent benchmark. Across these settings, final-answer-only calibration can miss retrieval and tool failures, while trajectory-level calibration keeps accepted-trajectory risk below the target.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Analytical Methodology for Quantifying Airspace Conflict Rate and Complexity

arXiv:2606.14897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Air traffic growth, advanced air mobility, and increasingly autonomous operations are driving the need for scalable and adaptive airspace design methodologies. Central to this challenge is quantifying how traffic flow structure and demand, governed in part by airspace geometry, influence conflict generation and operational complexity. This paper presents an analytical framework for computing conflict rate and conflict probability in structured airspace using stochastic flow models. Traffic streams are modeled as renewal processes with prescribed inter-arrival time distributions, while interactions between flows are captured through geometry-dependent minimum spacing constraints at merges and crossings. Within this formulation, closed-form upper bounds on the expected conflict rate and conflict probability per aircraft are derived as functions of flow configuration and demand. These metrics are interpreted as complementary measures of airspace complexity, reflecting controller workload and per-aircraft operational risk. The methodology is applied to representative hexagonal cell geometries with varying routing structures and flow distributions. Results reveal non-monotonic tradeoffs between routing flexibility, capacity, and conflict generation, with intermediate flow configurations outperforming both highly constrained and highly distributed cases. The proposed framework provides a tractable tool for evaluating airspace design alternatives and complexity-informed traffic management strategies.

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

EIBench: A Simulator-Based Benchmark and Turn-Credit RL for Emotion Management

Emotional intelligence (EI) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is often evaluated through static understanding tasks or single-response dialogue generation. However, emotion management is interactive: a good model should not only recognize a user's emotion, but also improve the user's emotional and relational state over several turns. We introduce EIBench, a simulator-based benchmark for interactive emotion management. EIBench contains 2,222 scenarios, with 2,009 for training and 213 for held-out testing. The scenarios are organized by a 2x2 taxonomy covering Support, Defense, Repair, and Charm, which together capture different forms of support, boundary maintenance, trust repair, and rapport building. In each scenario, an LLM simulator plays the user, updates an emotion-relation state after each turn, and maps the final state to an anchor-based score. This design makes EIBench both an evaluation benchmark and a training environment: the final state gives the outcome reward, while the per-turn state updates provide dense feedback for RL. We evaluate 15 open- and closed-source LLMs. Current models perform well on support and rapport-building scenes, but struggle with boundary maintenance under user pressure. To improve the EI ability of LLMs, we propose Centered Turn-Credit GRPO (CTC-GRPO), a GRPO extension that reuses the simulator's per-turn state updates as dense turn-level feedback while preserving the final outcome reward. CTC-GRPO improves Qwen3-8B from -22.4 to +22.4 on EIBench and also improves on out-of-distribution evaluations including SAGE (+12.4) and EQBench3 (+20.9%). Our results show that simulator-tracked user states can support both evaluation and training for multi-turn emotion management.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

LLMs Prompted for Legal Context Object More: Overrefusal from Small On-Premises LLMs in Criminal Legal Context

arXiv:2606.24585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics. To better anticipate such biases, we investigate several modern small LLMs that are most likely to be used as on-device assistants, to assess the impact of overrefusal on legal prompts. Surprisingly, we find that authority-style prefixes (``you are acting as an assistant of the national supreme court'', ``[...] defense lawyer'') systematically increase refusal rates by 2–20x over the no-prefix baseline, while a known role-play jailbreak prefix shows mixed effects, sharply increasing refusals in some models and barely shifting them in others. The finding suggests that small on-prem deployable LLMs are unstable under contextual framings that a real institutional user might naturally introduce, and further investigation is essential to minimize opportunities for bias.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dynamically frozen long-distance entanglement via non-Hermitian PT-symmetric systems

arXiv:2606.14177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In distributed quantum networks, interacting spin systems can mediate the generation of highly entangled links between distant nodes. We investigate the role of effective parity-time (PT)-symmetric non-Hermitian spin-1/2 bulks weakly coupled to two quantum links, obtained due to the environmental interactions affecting both the bulk and the links. Focusing on effective non-Hermitian nearest-neighbor (NN) Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models, we analyze how non-Hermiticity influences the dynamical formation of long-distance entanglement (LDE). For a paradigmatic model consisting of a quantum XX bulk subjected to imaginary staggered magnetic fields, we analytically determine the exceptional points arising from the resulting bulk-mediated interactions between the links. Combining analytical and numerical methods, we demonstrate that an initially fully separable state can dynamically evolve into highly entangled link states near these exceptional points in the broken regime. Further, after optimizing over time and system parameters, near-unit time-averaged entanglement between the links emerges under weak imaginary magnetic fields and bulk-link couplings, which cannot be attained in the corresponding Hermitian systems. Moreover, the non-Hermitian dynamics exhibit a freezing of high entanglement in the vicinity of exceptional points, a feature absent in Hermitian counterparts. We also identify regimes of long-range interaction strengths that yield a higher time-averaged entanglement than the corresponding NN models. Furthermore, we establish that LDE persists in the stationary regime, highlighting the promise of engineered non-Hermitian dynamics for realizing robust and frozen entangled links in quantum networks.

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

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Presurgical immune biomarkers associated with pain intensity and pain interference recovery after total knee arthroplasty: findings from the PRIME-KNEE study

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) prevalence after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is >20%. Circulating immune biomarkers are known factors of musculoskeletal pain but poorly understood as CPSP predictors. This prospective, longitudinal study of 203 patients s/p TKA tested presurgical plasma biomarkers associated with 6-month CPSP, using promising approaches from geriatrics biomarker research: expected recovery differential (ERD; resilience outcome) and penalized, machine-learning regularization modeling (elastic net and LASSO regression). Forty-nine presurgical candidate biomarkers were considered. CPSP was operationalized using ERDs built around PROMIS pain intensity and pain interference, which quantified the difference between observed and expected recovery after accounting for demographic, comorbidity, reserve, and perioperative factors. Plasma/ERDs from ~130 patients revealed 13 biomarkers with the highest selection stability criteria, and either positive or negative (+/-) associations with ERDs. Interleukin (IL) 5 (-) and Lipopolysaccharide-Binding Protein (LBP; +) were associated with both ERDs. Unique associations with pain intensity ERD included Cytomegalovirus-Specific IgG Negative (CMV IGg-; -), Macrophage Inflammatory Protein-1 Beta (MIP1b; -), IL12p70 (-, Cluster of Differentiation 30 (sCD30;-), Interferon alpha 2a (IFN2a;+), and Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF;+). Unique associations with pain interference ERD included Lipopolysaccharide (LPS;-), Activin A (-), IL8 (-), Serum Amyloid A (SAA;-), and IL7 (+). Protein-protein interaction analyses and topology motifs suggest a centralized network with higher-than-expected connectivity, involving IL5, IL7, IL8, MIP1{beta}, and IFN2a, among others. This study proposes rigorous yet feasible approaches to expedite pain biomarker research, and introduces presurgical biomarkers t0 consider in future TKA-CPSP biosignature derivation.