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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Error Propagation in Korean Spoken QA with ASR-LLM Cascades

We analyze how automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors propagate through ASR-LLM cascades in Korean spoken question answering (SQA), focusing on downstream semantic failures that conventional ASR metrics cannot fully capture. Our analysis shows that the relative downstream degradation caused by ASR errors is consistent across LLMs with different absolute performance, suggesting that cascade degradation largely tracks ASR-stage information loss. We further identify single-character Korean ASR errors as a Korean-specific loss channel, where even a minimal transcription difference can change the intended question and degrade downstream QA performance. Finally, an auxiliary comparison shows that a large audio language model outperforms an ASR-LLM cascade with an approximately matched language backbone in noisy Korean SQA, indicating the potential of direct audio input to mitigate transcript-induced information loss.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

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

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Rethinking Groups in Critic-Free RLVR

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models. Existing critic-free RL methods typically generate a group of rollouts for the same question to estimate value baselines for advantage computation. However, this design suffers from data inefficiency, group synchronization barriers, and inflexibility with structured rollouts. In this work, we revisit the role of the ``group'' and show that its underlying function is not merely to estimate baselines but to prevent false penalties on negative samples. Building on this insight, we propose negative token filtering, a simple and effective strategy that enables stable single-rollout training. We apply it to two batch-level advantage methods, achieving comparable performance on reasoning tasks and stronger performance on agentic tasks relative to group-based RL techniques.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform

arXiv:2606.20120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Generating function and Bloch representation for quantum Fisher tensor

arXiv:2603.04615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Uhlmann relative amplitude between two density matrices is shown to be a generating function, through which the quantum Fisher tensor that contains both the quantum Fisher information matrix and the mean Uhlmann curvature can be obtained via differentiation over system parameters. In the pure state limit, our generating function recovers that of the quantum geometric tensor proposed by Het\'{e}nyi and L\'{e}vay, and also clarifies the fidelity and phase between two quantum states as the generating functions of the quantum metric and Berry curvature, respectively. A generic expression for the quantum Fisher tensor in terms of the Bloch representation of density matrices is derived, which facilitates the calculation of the tensor, mean Uhlmann curvature, and geometric properties derived from the quantum Fisher information matrix. Canonical ensembles of spins are adopted to demonstrate our formalism, which reveals a constant Ricci scalar, a vacuum Einstein equation, and a cosmological constant on the 3D Euclidean manifold of the magnetic field.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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

Doeblin Curves

arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Bias-mitigated microbiome inference refines coronary artery disease signature

作者:

Roughly half the cells in the human body are microbial, and changes in these communities are increasingly implicated in cardiovascular, metabolic, and oncological diseases. Yet identifying which taxa truly differ in abundance, differential abundance (DA), is distorted by four major sources of bias: loss of total microbial load, taxa measurement efficiencies, arbitrary pseudocounts required to handle pervasive zeros, and contamination which has recently driven retractions. No existing DA method accounts for all four. Here we introduce BootDA, a non-parametric bootstrap-based method that explicitly models each bias source without data transformations, pseudocounts, parametric assumptions, or assuming that most taxa are non-DA. In semi-parametric simulations preserving the sparsity (>70% zeros) and correlation structure of real 16S amplicon data, BootDA achieved the highest sensitivity among tested methods, including ANCOM-BC2, LinDA, MaAsLin 3, and Wilcoxon tests, while controlling the false discovery rate. Performance was retained in low biomass settings when contamination contributed ~50% of counts, and without negative controls, indicating de novo decontamination capability. Applied to a coronary artery disease cohort, BootDA refined the original signature to two co-enriched genera, Klebsiella and Gemmiger, and excluded likely contaminants. BootDA is available as an R package and could generalise to other sparse, high dimensional biological data.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Deciphering shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species spatial transcriptomics

作者:

The integration of spatial transcriptomics (ST) data across species is essential for cross-species and translational studies, but remains challenging due to molecular divergence and anatomical differences between organisms. We present STACAME, a graph attention autoencoder-based framework to decipher shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species ST data by explicitly modeling both orthologous and species-specific genes. STACAME aligns ST slices in a spatially aware manner, identifies homologous and species-specific domains, and enables a suite of downstream comparative analyses. We demonstrate its utility by integrating ST datasets from diverse tissues, including hippocampus, isocortex, embryo, breast, liver, and cerebellum, across multiple species such as human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, and zebrafish. STACAME supports cross-species spatial domain alignment, the detection of shared and divergent spatially variable genes, development alignment and comparison, and the 3D integration of tissue architecture. This flexible approach facilitates the translation of findings from model organisms to humans, providing a unified computational platform for cross-species spatial transcriptomics.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

作者:

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

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

From Benchmarks to Skills: Low-Rank Factors for LLM Evaluation

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on a growing collection of benchmarks and on aggregate benchmark scores, yet it remains unclear what this comparison actually captures, and what these scores reveal about models' underlying capabilities. Here, we propose a new paradigm for LLM evaluation, by asking whether benchmark performance reflects many independent abilities, or rather relies on a small number of shared dimensions. To answer this, we apply Factor Analysis (FA) to a massive performance matrix of LLMs versus benchmarks \((60\times44)\) revealing an intrinsically low-rank structure of that matrix. That is, a small number of latent factors captures most of the structure in the full task space. This low-rank geometry reveals substantial redundancy across existing tasks and explains why many benchmarks appear to be measuring overlapping abilities. We further show that these latent factors correspond to coherent, skill-like, dimensions of LLM behavior. Leveraging this latent skill-space, we deliver three practical tools for LLM evaluation and downstream users: (i)~identifying redundant tasks, (ii)~profiling new models using a small subset of tasks, and (iii)~selecting models aligned with desired skill profiles. Our method provides a solid alternative to the de-facto standard of a single aggregate score, and establishes an interpretable and practical framework for understanding and benchmarking LLM core capabilities.

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

The Mathematics of AI Winters: The mathematical Taxonomy of Paradigm Fragility in AI Winter

arXiv:2606.12610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two major periods of reduced funding and confidence in artificial intelligence research, commonly called the first and second AI winters, are usually explained through engineering failure, commercial disappointment, and inflated expectations. This article develops a complementary thesis: that the dominant paradigms of those periods also met genuine formal barriers, including limitations of representation, optimisation, computational complexity, statistical learnability, and high-dimensional approximation. The contribution is synthetic rather than archival. We do not claim that particular theorems mechanically caused the winters; rather, we show that several central disappointments of early AI were aligned with mathematically precise bottlenecks. We analyse these bottlenecks through the perceptron impossibility results of Minsky and Papert, the complexity-theoretic hardness of exact neural-network training established by Blum and Rivest, minimax rates for nonparametric estimation in high dimension due to Stone, vanishing-gradient analyses by Hochreiter and by Bengio and collaborators, and classical statistical learning theory in the tradition of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, Valiant, and Blumer and collaborators. We then relate these barriers to the later breakthroughs that mitigated, rather than eliminated, them.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Passive-User Bell-State Loop-Back Key Establishment without Quantum Detectors at the User Nodes

arXiv:2606.19551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose and analyze a Bell-state extension of the Loop-Back quantum key distribution architecture for secret-key establishment between two passive users that do not require quantum transmitters or quantum detectors. In the proposed setting, a single active station, Alice, provides the entangled-state infrastructure, retains one qubit of an initially prepared Bell pair, and sends the traveling subsystem through two passive users, denoted by $B_1$ and $B_2$. Each passive user applies a local Pauli operation to the same traveling subsystem, so that the operation observed by Alice is only the effective composition $U_{\mathrm{eff}}=U_2U_1$. After the subsystem returns, Alice performs a Bell-state measurement and, using her private knowledge of the initial Bell state, deterministically identifies the effective Pauli operation. However, the individual factors $U_1$ and $U_2$ remain algebraically hidden from Alice whenever the local choices are uniformly and independently selected. The public effective operation acts as a parity-like constraint: each passive user can infer the operation applied by the other from its own private choice, while the active station learns only the global composition. This construction transfers the essential distributed-transformation mechanism of passive-user Loop-Back QKD to the entangled-state regime. Unlike single-qubit passive-user schemes, whose useful events are intrinsically post-selected, the Bell-state version is limited primarily by the success probability of the Bell-state measurement. We discuss the algebraic structure of the protocol, its interpretation as an infrastructure-assisted mediated key-establishment mechanism, and the physical assumptions required to protect passive Pauli modulators against active injection or Trojan-horse-type attacks.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

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

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Enhanced Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliable and Efficient Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

arXiv:2510.21127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid advancements in sensor networks, conventional battery-powered sensor networks suffer from limited operational lifespans and frequent maintenance requirements that severely constrain their deployment in remote and inaccessible environments. As such, wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) with mobile charging capabilities offer a promising solution to extend network lifetime. However, WRSNs face critical challenges from the inherent trade-off between maximizing the node survival rates and maximizing charging energy efficiency under dynamic operational conditions. In this paper, we investigate a typical scenario where mobile chargers move and charge the sensor, thereby maintaining the network connectivity while minimizing the energy waste. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the network node survival rate and mobile charger energy usage efficiency across multiple time slots, which presents NP-hard computational complexity with long-term temporal dependencies that make traditional optimization approaches ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced evolutionary multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which integrates a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based policy network for temporal pattern recognition, a multilayer perceptron-based prospective increment model for future state prediction, and a time-varying Pareto policy evaluation method for dynamic preference adaptation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing approaches in balancing node survival rate and energy efficiency while generating diverse Pareto-optimal solutions. Moreover, the LSTM-enhanced policy network converges 25% faster than conventional networks, with the time-varying evaluation method effectively adapting to dynamic conditions.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

作者:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

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

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.