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

GOOSE-M2F: Adapting Mask2Former for High-Fidelity, Long-Tailed Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation in Unstructured Outdoor Terrain

We present GOOSE-M2F, a task-specific adaptation of Mask2Former for the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation (FGSS) Challenge at ICRA~2026. The GOOSE benchmark spans 64 fine-grained classes across unstructured outdoor terrain with a severely long-tailed distribution, where rare classes occupy fewer than 50 pixels per image. We extend the Swin-Large Mask2Former baseline with three targeted contributions: (1)200 Object Queries to eliminate representational saturation; (2)a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) combining ASPP-lite and CBAM dual-attention; and (3)an Auxiliary Supervision Head that delivers direct per-pixel gradients for rare classes. A multi-stage training strategy pairs Distribution-Balanced loss, Rare-Class Copy-Paste augmentation, dynamic IoU-aware re-weighting, and EMA. At inference, a dense sliding-window engine with 2D Gaussian kernel blending and 4-scale TTA adds +10.57\%. GOOSE-M2F achieves 70.08\% Official Composite mIoU (63.55\% fine, 76.61\% coarse), placing 3rd on the GOOSE 2D FGSS leaderboard. Code and trained models are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Aditya-Lingam-9000/GOOSE-M2F}{Github GOOSE-M2F Code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/XYZ9843/GOOSE-M2F}{Hugging Face GOOSE-M2F}.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Quantized Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods for Distributed Optimization under Relaxed Global Geometry

arXiv:2606.11339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed optimization with stochastic gradients and finite-bit communication modeled by random (unbiased) quantization. We propose q-PDGD, a quantized stochastic primal-dual method, and analyze it under relaxed global geometry. Under restricted secant inequality (RSI), a constant step-size yields linear contraction to an explicit neighborhood determined by gradient noise, quantization distortion, and network connectivity, while a diminishing step-size achieves O(1/k) convergence without shared-minimizer assumptions. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, we obtain linear-to-neighborhood convergence in the same stochastic quantized setting. Our results match the best-known centralized stochastic rates in oracle complexity, and are supported by experiments demonstrating the predicted tradeoffs between quantization level, step-size choice, and graph structure.

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

To forget is to preserve: Machine Unlearning for 3D medical image segmentation

With new data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [1] that allow individuals to ask that any of their personal information be erased from trained machine learning models, there has been a push to investigate the unlearning of data from models as a way to comply with these laws. In this regard, based on four mechanics, we consider several approximate unlearning strategies applied to the MRBrainS18 dataset [2]. We use a 3D ResNet-50 [3] as a backbone architecture for segmentation that has been pre-trained with the Med3D framework [4]. Considering the pre-trained model as a baseline, we evaluate respective retention accuracy on 2 types of subjects, i.e., retain and forget. We assess these approaches through their Dice similarity coefficient and mean absolute error (MAE) values using two separate training horizons 20 and 50 epochs. The results show that the Noisy Label strategy had the best overall trade-off with a decrease of 93% in the forget set while maintaining 84% accuracy for the retained set after 50 epochs. All other strategies showed extreme levels of forgetting at higher epoch numbers while also demonstrating catastrophic degradation of their retain set performance. The results of this study provide a strict baseline of performance metrics for unlearning on a subject-specific level and provide practitioners with clear criteria for selecting the proper strategies.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

The Unfireable Safety Kernel: Execution-Time AI Alignment for AI Agents and Other Escapable AI Systems

arXiv:2606.26057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are granted access to tools, APIs, and other infrastructure, making them active principals in those systems. The dominant approach places controls inside the agent's own runtime: system prompts, output filters, and guardrail libraries. Any control in the agent's address space is reachable by inputs that influence it; this generalizes to any AI system with sufficient reach into its own runtime, a class we term escapable AI systems. We identify four properties that an authorization mechanism must satisfy for architectural control rather than for cooperative requests: process separation, pre-action enforcement on a structurally only path, fail-closed at both the request and system levels, and externalized signed evidence verifiable outside the controlled system's trust boundary. We position this layer as execution-time AI alignment, complementing training-time alignment (RLHF, Constitutional AI) and inference-time alignment. We present the Unfireable Safety Kernel, a Rust reference implementation realizing all four. Its fail-closed invariant is machine-checked at two levels: an SMT theorem (Z3) and an exhaustive bounded-model-checking proof of the production decision function (Kani, 4/4 harnesses). A Python-to-Rust migration was gated on byte-equivalence (1000/1000 fixtures; 17/17 adversarial classes). We evaluate the kernel governing a live, escapable AI system, a deterministic, self-improving world model, against an escape-seeking adversary driving its real self-modification seam: across 1,000 self-modifications, all 704 attempts on the safety-critical core are refused, with no escape; a further 300, under the operator kill switch, are also refused. A separate campaign of 6,240 authorization round-trips had no successful bypass. Against 3 contemporary systems claiming the agent control plane, the agent invokes control; here, it lacks that choice.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

The Effective Number of Nonzeros: Theory and Regularization for Sparse Recovery

arXiv:2603.13826v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical sparse recovery treats all nonzero entries equally, though numerical noise often creates long tails of negligible coefficients. This paper develops an entropy-based notion of effective sparsity to measure the coefficients carrying significant mass. The central quantity, the effective number of nonzeros (ENZ), is obtained by exponentiating the Shannon entropy of the normalized magnitude distribution. We show that ENZ decomposes exactly into the support cardinality multiplied by a distributional efficiency factor, thereby making precise its relation to the $\ell_0$ count and explaining how it discounts uninformative coefficients. Furthermore, the Shannon ENZ is embedded into a parallel Rényi family that recovers several scale-invariant sparsity measures, including the $\ell_1/\ell_2$ ratio, as special cases. We then prove a stability result under a restricted isometry condition, establishing an explicit bound that depends on the tail energy, measurement perturbation, and restricted isometry constant. For computation, a separable unnormalized entropy surrogate is introduced to avoid global coupling. Numerical experiments on sparse signal recovery and gradient-domain image denoising demonstrate that the resulting regularizer is robust, computationally efficient, and competitive with standard sparsity penalties.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Evaluation of Corneal Subbasal Nerve Plexus Alterations in ARSACS and SPG7 by In Vivo Corneal Confocal Microscopy

Purpose: To investigate corneal subbasal nerve plexus alterations using in vivo corneal confocal microscopy (IVCM) in patients with Autosomal Recessive Spastic Ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay (ARSACS) and Spastic Paraplegia Type 7 (SPG7). Methods: This cross-sectional pilot study included eight ARSACS patients, five SPG7 patients, and twenty age- and sex-matched healthy controls. All participants underwent neurological and ophthalmological examination followed by central corneal imaging using IVCM. Quantitative corneal nerve parameters were analyzed with automated software, and correlations with clinical severity scales were assessed. Results: The mean age was 34.2 +/- 3.4 years in controls, 34.5 +/- 0.7 years in the ARSACS group, and 38.2 +/- 3.5 years in the SPG7 group. Corneal nerve branch density (CNBD) and corneal nerve total branch density (CTBD) were significantly lower in ARSACS and SPG7 patients compared with healthy controls. CNFD, CNFL, CNFA, CNFW, and CNFrD were lower in ARSACS and SPG7 patients compared with healthy controls; however, these differences did not reach statistical significance. No statistically significant differences in IVCM parameters were detected between ARSACS and SPG7 patients. Spearman correlation analysis did not show significant correlations between corneal nerve parameters and FARS, SARA, ADL scores, or disease duration. Conclusion: IVCM revealed reduced corneal nerve branching parameters in patients with ARSACS and SPG7. These findings indicate involvement of the corneal subbasal nerve plexus and support the potential role of corneal confocal microscopy as a non-invasive ocular imaging modality for evaluating peripheral neural alterations in hereditary spastic ataxias.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

ConSolv: Solvent-Conditional Machine Learning Implicit Solvent Potential

arXiv:2606.24983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Implicit solvent machine learning potentials (MLPs) offer a powerful route to bridging the gap between accuracy and efficiency in molecular simulations. However, existing models have largely focused on aqueous environments, overlooking the diverse and important roles of non-aqueous solvents in areas such as organic synthesis and battery technology. Here, we present ConSolv, a solvent-conditional MLP architecture that explicitly incorporates solvent effects on solute interactions through an attention-based solvent-embedding block. By combining experimental solvation free energy data with ab initio data, we train a single implicit solvent MLP that is transferable across 66 common organic solvents. ConSolv outperforms classical explicit solvent methods and selected ab initio implicit solvent approaches across multiple solvation free energy benchmarks, and demonstrates generalization to unseen solvents. Beyond solvation free energies, the model shows close agreement with experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data for $\gamma$-fluorohydrin molecules in chloroform. ConSolv's architecture is readily extensible to broader chemical spaces and alternative training strategies, while its attention-based design supports explainable artificial intelligence (AI) analysis that can help elucidate complex, solvent-dependent molecular interactions.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Mixing Times for the Facilitated Exclusion Process

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

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Small moments of the sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions

arXiv:2606.16004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the first version of Chang, Slote, Volberg, and Zhang's paper [BSA_of_PTF], the authors modify a nice recursive approach due to Kane in [Correct_exponent_for_AS] where he bounded the average sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. In [BSA_of_PTF] Kane's argument was adopted to estimate the boolean surface area of polynomial threshold function. The bridge is a combinatorial averaging lemma considering all balanced partitions. The lemma serves as a substitute for an additive property of average sensitivity. With the lemma, one can apply a Kane-type algorithm to derive a recurrence. Solving the recurrence then gives an upper bound of $e^{C_d \sqrt{\log n}}$ for the boolean surface area. In the second version of the same paper, the authors derive a polylog upper bound for BSA of PTFs. The difference is that they use a tail estimate for the sensitivity function. With the help of a polynomial restriction lemma in [poly_restriction] they sharpen the upper bound. It is noteworthy that when applying the polynomial restriction, each coordinate is put into each part independently with equal probability. As a result, a partition does not necessarily have equal-size blocks. In other words, it may not be balanced. In this note, we first investigate the effect of different partitioning. Second, we use the recursive method in the first version to derive a polylog upper bound for $\mathbb E[s(x)^{\eta}]$ where $\eta < 1/2$. It is interesting to note the phase transition that happens at $\eta=1/2$ in both versions of the proof (but in a completely different form). Section [PhaseTr-s] treats that.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean-Field Games with Average Reward

arXiv:2606.16759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study inverse reinforcement learning for discrete-time, infinite-horizon mean-field games (MFGs) under an average-reward criterion. Expert demonstrations are assumed to arise from a stationary mean-field equilibrium under an unknown reward, and the goal is to recover a policy explaining the observed behaviour via the maximum causal entropy principle. We formulate the inverse problem by enforcing consistency with the expert mean-field term and long-run feature expectations, treating two reward classes within a unified occupation-measure framework. For finite-dimensional linear rewards, we give a convex dual reformulation with an explicit log-partition objective, and prove smoothness and curvature properties justifying constant-step-size gradient descent. For infinite-dimensional RKHS rewards, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation whose inner-maximising policy is characterised by a soft Bellman equation. The main obstacle is the absence of a discount-factor contraction. We resolve this by introducing a minorisation-based sub-stochastic kernel that yields a strict contraction of the soft Bellman operator. We establish Fréchet differentiability and Lipschitz smoothness of the log-likelihood score, leading to a gradient ascent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Two numerical examples, a malware-spread MFG and an RKHS-based consumer-choice model, show that the recovered policies closely match expert behaviour.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Event-Aligned Analysis of Multi-Rater Pain Assessments Using Continuous Wearable Physiology

arXiv:2606.23705v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pain is assessed differently by patients, nurses, and clinicians, yet most computational approaches assume a single ground-truth label - effectively ignoring who is doing the rating. We introduce a rater-aware, event-aligned framework that converts sparse, rater-specific pain ratings into discrete pain-change events and aligns continuous wearable physiological signals to these events, preserving rater identity throughout. Applied to multimodal wearable data collected during spine-related pain procedures, the framework identifies substantial disagreement across rater groups and provides preliminary, exploratory evidence of rater-dependent physiological differences preceding reported pain increases. These findings suggest that pain-physiology relationships may not be rater-invariant, and that aggregating assessments across raters may mask meaningful physiological patterns. A rater-aware, event-aligned perspective is therefore a promising direction for interpreting wearable data in real-world clinical pain assessment.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

MacroLens: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Contextual Financial Reasoning under Macroeconomic Scenarios

arXiv:2606.24950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial decision-making is contextual: forecasting prices, valuing companies, and assessing event exposure weigh price history, accounting fundamentals, macroeconomic regime, and contemporaneous text. A benchmark over these four signals is hard to build because finance violates four assumptions of time-series evaluation: text must be gated by its publication date to prevent look-ahead, quarterly fundamentals are reported with a one- to ninety-day lag, filing text is partly redundant with the numerical statement fields it accompanies, and macroeconomic regimes leak across calendar splits. No public benchmark addresses all four signals jointly. MacroLens covers 4,416 U.S. small- and micro-cap equities over 2021-2026. Seven tasks share one point-in-time panel of prices, 46.8M XBRL accounting facts, 53 macroeconomic series, 295,860 SEC filings, and 215,882 news articles, plus a scenario layer of 1,130 macroeconomic events across 49 types automatically detected and rendered as natural language. Tasks span contextual forecasting, public and private valuation, statement generation from fundamentals and descriptions, scenario-conditioned returns, and real-estate valuation. We evaluate 19 methods across six families spanning naive heuristics through time-series foundation models, fine-tuned LLM-based time-series models, and zero-shot large language models (LLMs), plus a five-step feature-context ablation on two frontier LLMs and a gradient-boosted baseline. MacroLens is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DeepAuto-AI/MacroLens.

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

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

LLM Evolution as an Industry-Scale Ecosystem: A Lifecycle Perspective on Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.24901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning capability is critical for Industrial LLMs, as deployed models must be continuously updated to meet evolving requirements and environments, rather than repeatedly retrained from scratch. However, most existing research focuses on improvements on static benchmarks, failing to capture real industrial needs. In this survey, we reformulate Industrial Continual Learning (ICL) for LLMs as a closed-loop update-and-release problem in a versioned ecosystem, where updates propagate hierarchically to industrial, application-specific models and LLM-powered applications, with capability inheritance and transfer across versions and model families. From this ecosystem perspective, we identify three core challenges: repeated adaptation erodes model plasticity, foundation-model upgrades break capability inheritance, and long-term sustainability is constrained by deployment requirements. We then organize the technical landscape of ICL around five lifecycle design principles: preserving plasticity headroom, treating upgrades as capability transfer, enabling trustworthy continual reinforcement learning, making training recipes self-optimizing, and building accountability as a base layer for long-term iteration. For each principle, we synthesize representative technical directions. Finally, we evaluate the maturity of each principle and its technical components via an evidence-based lens, identify key gaps hindering real-world deployment, and outline a practical ICL deployment blueprint and a pathway for feeding industrial realities back into academic research.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Maximal global device-independent randomness from projective measurements in every dimension

arXiv:2606.21369v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Device-independent random number generation (DIQRNG) is the most secure form of generating private randomness using quantum physical processes. Its strength lies in producing numbers that are impossible to predict by any eavesdropper restricted by the laws of quantum theory. Moreover, security is proven solely from observed measurement statistics, without the need to characterise or trust the devices used in random number generation. Implementing DIQRNG is, however, costly, as it requires high-quality entangled systems. It is therefore important to make the best use of available resources. In this work, we show that using projective measurements – which are most readily implementable experimentally – one can certify $2\log(d)$ bits of device-independent randomness from a bipartite system of local dimension $d$ for every $d \ge 2$, thus reaching the theoretically maximum possible rate of DIQRNG. We provide explicit protocols reaching $2\log(d)$ bits based on mutually unbiased bases. Furthermore, we compute numerical bounds on the rate for the case of imperfect implementations, showing that our protocols are robust to experimental noise.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

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

RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations and that, by conditioning on evolving noisy representations, test-time compute can be productively spent on repeated MLLM conditioning in modern T2I systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Structural MRI Synthesis for Alzheimer's Disease via Conditional Diffusion on Anatomical Masks

arXiv:2606.18354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative machine learning models have significantly improved medical imaging, offering promising solutions for data augmentation, privacy preservation, and improved model generalization. However, synthesizing high-quality structural MRI data for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remains challenging due to the subtle, region-specific, and progressive anatomical changes associated with neurodegeneration. In this paper, we extend the Med-DDPM conditional diffusion model – originally designed for brain tumor synthesis – to generate 3D structural MRIs specifically tailored to AD. We adopted Med-DDPM due to its established stability and structural fidelity compared to other generative models, which makes it particularly suitable for capturing the subtle anatomical changes characteristic of AD. Our approach conditions the diffusion process on anatomical segmentation masks derived from the ADNI dataset, incorporating key AD-relevant brain structures into the generation process. We systematically evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images by training segmentation models on real, synthetic, and hybrid (mixed) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained exclusively on synthetic data achieve comparable Dice scores (0.6532) to those trained on real data (0.6513), while exhibiting significantly enhanced recall. Notably, models trained on hybrid datasets (mixing real and synthetic images) outperform both real and synthetic-only baselines, achieving a Dice score of 0.7244. These findings underscore the successful use of conditional diffusion models for generating anatomically accurate, AD-specific synthetic MRIs, and highlight their potential for enhancing training data availability, improving diagnostic accuracy, and promoting research reproducibility in neuroimaging studies.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

HKVM-RAG: Key-Value-Separated Hypergraph Evidence Organization for Multi-Hop RAG

Multi-hop RAG poses a data-engineering problem beyond passage matching: under fixed retrieval budgets, a system must organize retrieved text into evidence units that expose answer chains. Dense retrievers score passages independently, while graph-based memories make associations explicit but often rely on pairwise or entity-centered keys that fragment multi-hop evidence. We present HKVM-RAG, a key-value-separated evidence-organization layer. It assembles answer-path hyperedges from cached passage-level LLM evidence tuples and uses them as retrieval keys, while retaining passage text as answer values. To isolate key-space design, our fixed-substrate protocol holds the tuple cache, candidate passages, reader, and evaluation budget constant across pairwise graph and hypergraph variants. Weighted hypergraph key-value retrieval improves over KG-PPR by +3.426 F1 on 2WikiMultiHopQA and +3.592 F1 on MuSiQue; HotpotQA shows that higher structured support coverage need not yield standalone answer-F1 gains. We therefore study WHG-KV as an evidence-control signal rather than a dense-retrieval replacement. Oracle and train-to-dev analyses identify support selection as repairable, and a dense-aware controller combines frozen ColBERTv2 and HKVM rank/score features using out-of-fold HKVM predictions. It reaches 88.846, 65.073, and 85.810 F1 on the three benchmarks, improving over ColBERTv2 by +11.084, +6.763, and +5.966 F1. Source-level ablations show that matched non-WHG structured signals do not match the WHG-KV gains. These results provide bounded evidence that key-value-separated hypergraph organization can serve as a reusable evidence-control mechanism for multi-hop RAG.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

EvalStop: Using World Feedback to Detect and Correct Reward Overoptimization in Multi-Tenant RLHF Platforms

arXiv:2606.04145v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cloud LLM fine-tuning platforms increasingly serve RLHF workloads, where a learned reward model is optimized as a proxy for human quality. As Gao et al. (2023) showed, this proxy diverges from world feedback (downstream eval metrics) under sustained optimization pressure, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. Existing platform schedulers ignore this divergence: non-clairvoyant schedulers optimize JCT without any quality signal, SLAQ-style quality-aware schedulers use training loss (a weaker proxy that drops monotonically through hacking), and classical per-job early stopping requires human monitoring and does not free shared GPUs. We propose EvalStop, a composable scheduling primitive that terminates jobs on k consecutive eval-score declines, releases GPUs, preserves the best checkpoint, and delegates to any base scheduler. We frame scheduler-level early stopping as a detection problem and evaluate it in a discrete-event simulator whose RLHF workload mixes reward-hacking and structurally healthy runs, with ground-truth labels hidden from schedulers. On RLHF-heavy workloads (80% RLHF, 64 GPUs), EvalStop achieves precision 98% / recall 99% / FPR 1.5% while improving JCT by 9% and cutting wasted compute by 22% over SRTF-Est (p