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

AnalogFed: Privacy-Preserving Discovery of Analog Circuits at Scale with Federated Generative AI

arXiv:2507.15104v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) have shown transformative potential for modern hardware design. However, existing GenAI-driven approaches fall short of enabling large-scale electronic design automation (EDA) due to the proprietary and siloed nature of hardware datasets, which cannot be centralized for model training. Achieving at-scale GenAI-driven EDA, therefore, requires a novel privacy-preserving framework that can leverage distributed data without compromising confidentiality. This work introduces AnalogFed, the first privacy-preserving framework for large-scale analog circuit topology discovery using federated learning (FedL) and GenAI. AnalogFed establishes the feasibility of collaborative analog topology design while addressing key security challenges: it mitigates membership inference attacks (MIAs) through a novel input perturbation strategy based on dummy token injection, and defends against model inversion attacks with customized, efficient homomorphic encryption. Extensive experiments demonstrate AnalogFed's effectiveness and efficiency, achieving strong privacy protection without degrading model utility. This framework lays the foundation for scalable, multi-party collaboration in next-generation hardware design automation with GenAI.

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

RASST: Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech translation produces target text incrementally from partial speech input. Recent speech large language models have markedly improved SST quality but still struggle with rare and domain-specific terminology. Retrieval augmentation has helped in automatic speech recognition and neural machine translation, but extending it to SST is non-trivial: retrieval must be fast and accurate under partial speech, and the model must decide whether and when to apply retrieved terms during incremental generation. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Simultaneous Speech Translation (RASST), which addresses both challenges. For accurate cross-modal retrieval under partial input, RASST trains a lightweight speech-text retriever that produces chunkwise terminology hints for the Speech LLM via multi-scale retrieval. To use these hints correctly, we synthesize training data that teaches the Speech LLM to decide whether and when to apply each retrieved term. Experiments on ACL 60/60 dev set and the ESO test set show that RASST improves terminology accuracy by nearly 40% and overall translation quality by up to 3 BLEU points, with negligible computational overhead.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Who can compete with quantum computers? Lecture notes on quantum inspired tensor networks computational techniques

arXiv:2601.03035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This is a set of lectures on tensor networks with a strong emphasis on the core algorithms involving Matrix Product States (MPS) and Matrix Product Operators (MPO). Compared to other presentations, particular care has been given to disentangle aspects of tensor networks from the quantum many-body problem: MPO/MPS algorithms are presented as a way to deal with linear algebra on extremely (exponentially) large matrices and vectors, regardless of any particular application. The lectures include well-known algorithms to find eigenvectors of MPOs (the celebrated DMRG), solve linear problems, and recent learning algorithms that allow one to map a known function into an MPS (the Tensor Cross Interpolation, or TCI, algorithm). The lectures end with a discussion of how to represent functions and perform calculus with tensor networks using the "quantics" representation. They include the detailed analytical construction of important MPOs such as those for differentiation, indefinite integration, convolution, and the quantum Fourier transform. Three concrete applications are discussed in detail: the simulation of a quantum computer (either exactly or with compression), the simulation of a quantum annealer, and techniques to solve partial differential equations (e.g. Poisson, diffusion, or Gross-Pitaevskii) within the "quantics" representation. The lectures have been designed to be accessible to a first-year PhD student and include detailed proofs of all statements.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantifying and detecting quantum-state texture

arXiv:2604.07257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum-state texture is a recently proposed quantum resource that characterizes the inhomogeneity of a quantum state's matrix element distribution in the computational basis, enriching our understanding of quantum state structure. To expand its quantification toolkit and establish detection methods, in this article, we investigate the resource theory of texture from both quantitative and detection perspectives. First, we construct a texture measure $\mathcal{T}^{GR}_{\alpha,z}(\rho)$ based on the $\alpha$-$z$ Rényi relative entropy and present some of its inherent properties. Second, we analyze the mathematical relationships between several existing texture measures, revealing connections among different quantifiers. Finally, drawing on the witness concept from other resource theories, we systematically introduce texture witnesses into the texture theory and provide examples of texture witnesses with special properties.

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

Convex Approximation of Two-Layer ReLU Networks for Hidden State Differential Privacy

arXiv:2407.04884v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The hidden state threat model of differential privacy (DP) assumes that the adversary has access only to the final trained machine learning (ML) model, without seeing intermediate states during training. However, the current privacy analyses under this model are restricted to convex optimization problems, reducing their applicability to multi-layer neural networks, which are essential in modern deep learning applications. Notably, the most successful applications of the hidden state privacy analyses in classification tasks have only been for logistic regression models. We demonstrate that it is possible to privately train convex problems with privacy-utility trade-offs comparable to those of 2-layer ReLU networks trained with DP stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). This is achieved through a stochastic approximation of a dual formulation of the ReLU minimization problem, resulting in a strongly convex problem. This enables the use of existing hidden state privacy analyses and provides accurate privacy bounds also for the noisy cyclic mini-batch gradient descent (NoisyCGD) method with fixed disjoint mini-batches. Empirical results on benchmark classification tasks demonstrate that NoisyCGD can achieve privacy-utility trade-offs on par with DP-SGD applied to 2-layer ReLU networks.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroQubit: a lightweight, honesty-first de-novo design platform for geroscience-native small molecules with calibrated uncertainty

作者:

Computational molecule generation has outpaced its own credibility. We present GeroQubit, a GPU-free de-novo design platform that organizes candidates along a target x tissue x hallmark model and reports every signal alongside its measured baseline. We treat our tissue aging-signature readout as a mechanistic structural prior that we explicitly disclose is not validated against lifespan, and we surface efficacy only through a structure-to-lifespan k-NN whose weak but real signal (leave-one-out rho ~ 0.145) is wrapped in empirically-calibrated conformal intervals (90% target, 90.3% measured coverage). On a held-out retrospective recovery of ~1,940 ChEMBL binders against decoys, the score reaches ROC-AUC 0.945 with ~20x enrichment at 1% (BEDROC 0.91) and survives a scaffold-disjoint split - yet we report that it collapses to near-random (AUC 0.62) on genuinely novel chemotypes. Molecules are assembled reaction-first, so every candidate carries a verified synthetic route and atom-level synthon provenance; ADMET is handled as a multi-objective Pareto problem. We frame the disclosed weak signals and the hard-case failures not as flaws but as the honest, decision-useful output the field's own critics demand.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Reasoning Models Know What's Important, and Encode It in Their Activations

Language models often solve complex tasks by generating long reasoning chains, consisting of many steps with varying importance. While some steps are crucial for generating the final answer, others are removable. Determining which steps matter most, and why, remains an open question central to understanding how models process reasoning. We investigate if this question is best approached through model internals or through tokens of the reasoning chain itself. We find that model activations contain more information than tokens for identifying important reasoning steps. Crucially, by training probes on model activations to predict importance, we show that models encode an internal representation of step importance, even prior to the generation of subsequent steps. The internal representations of importance in different models yield high agreement on which steps are important. The representation is distributed across layers, and does not correlate with surface-level features, such as a step's relative position or its length. Our findings suggest that analyzing activations can reveal aspects of reasoning that surface-level approaches fundamentally miss, indicating that reasoning analyses should look into model internals.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

When Smaller Wins: Dual-Stage Distillation and Pareto-Guided Compression of Liquid Neural Networks for Edge Battery Prognostics

arXiv:2601.06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Battery management systems increasingly require accurate battery health prognostics under strict on-device constraints. This paper presents DLNet, a practical framework with dual-stage distillation of liquid neural networks that turns a high-capacity model into compact and edge-deployable models for battery health prediction. DLNet first applies Euler discretization to reformulate liquid dynamics for embedded compatibility. It then performs dual-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the teacher model's temporal behavior and recover it after further compression. Pareto-guided selection under joint error-cost objectives retains student models that balance accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate DLNet on a widely used dataset and validate real-device feasibility on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense using int8 deployment. The final deployed student achieves a low error of 0.0066 when predicting battery health over the next 100 cycles, which is 15.4% lower than the teacher model. It reduces the model size from 616 kB to 94 kB with 84.7% reduction and takes 21 ms per inference on the device. These results support a practical smaller wins observation that a small model can match or exceed a large teacher for edge-based prognostics with proper supervision and selection. Beyond batteries, the DLNet framework can extend to other industrial analytics tasks with strict hardware constraints.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum models with the Yang-Lee phase transition

arXiv:2606.19732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this article, we present four different $1+1$D quantum models that realize the Yang-Lee (YL) phase transition under a deformation that preserves $PT$ symmetry. These are the antiferromagnetic Ising spin chain in transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields, the massive Schwinger model, the Blume-Capel model, and the three-state quantum clock model. Using the state-operator correspondence, we identify the YL critical point, compute the scaling dimensions of the lowest operators in each model, and find perfect agreement with the exact results for the YL criticality in two dimensions. Using bosonization for the Schwinger model and the Polyakov-Hubbard transformation for the other models, we show that in all of these quantum models the YL critical point is described, as expected, by a massless bosonic field with an $i \phi^3$ interaction. In the quantum clock model, this critical field interacts with a massive bosonic field, and we identify the massless and massive states in the Hamiltonian spectrum. In addition, we numerically compute the two-point function of $\phi$ at the Yang-Lee critical point and show that it grows with distance, in agreement with theoretical expectations.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Scalar Quantum Fields: Theory Space and its Geometry

arXiv:2606.12580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scalar fields provide perhaps the simplest playground in which to develop our understanding of quantum field theory. In this lecture, we consider what it means to write down a scalar quantum field theory and how we can give geometrical interpretations to the space of such theories: the theory space.

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

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Note on the local calculation of decoherence of quantum superposition in the static black holes

arXiv:2606.14178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the decoherence of a quantum spatial superposition of a static particle in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m black holes. By treating the particle as a localized classical source coupled to a quantum scalar field, we reformulate the decoherence process in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald (DSW) gedankenexperiment through coherent state generation and derive the local expression for the decoherence functional in terms of the Wightman function. In the long-time limit, the decoherence rate is shown to be characterized by the low-frequency behavior of the Wightman function. We then employ the asymptotic matching method to calculate the analytical expressions of the Wightman functions in the Boulware, Unruh, and Hartle-Hawking vacua. We show that the decoherence behavior depends on the quantum state of the environmental field. While the Boulware vacuum gives vanishing decoherence for a static superposition, the thermal effects associated with Hawking radiation in the Unruh and Hartle-Hawking vacua can induce nonvanishing decoherence.

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

Artificial Intelligence in Ship Finance: Applications, Opportunities, and a Case Study in AI-Augmented Loan Origination

arXiv:2606.11238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ship finance is a data-intensive and document-heavy segment of asset-based lending, requiring the integration of financial, technical, contractual, and regulatory information from heterogeneous and largely unstructured sources. Increasing environmental regulation and ESG reporting requirements are adding further complexity to underwriting and loan-origination processes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), create new opportunities for processing and analysing such information. This paper reviews potential applications of AI in ship finance, with a particular focus on LLM-based systems for document comprehension, information extraction, and workflow automation. We present ShipFinance.ai, a modular agentic architecture to support loan application workflows in ship finance. The proposed system combines an LLM-based extraction module, financial analysis components, external maritime data services, and a controlled document-generation module with a chatbot interface to support the preparation of standardized financing applications. The paper discusses the key challenges for using such models in production. We argue that AI-assisted systems can support maritime finance professionals in managing increasingly complex information and reporting requirements.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

20.
Science (Express) 2026-04-16

Protein-templated synthesis of dinucleotide repeat DNA by an antiphage reverse transcriptase | Science

作者: 未知作者

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) are widespread bacterial anti-phage systems that use unconventional mechanisms of polynucleotide synthesis. We show that DRT3, which comprises two distinct RTs (Drt3a and Drt3b) and a noncoding RNA (ncRNA), synthesizes alternating poly(GT/AC) double-stranded DNA. Cryo–electron microscopy structures at 2.6 Å resolution reveal a D3-symmetric 6:6:6 complex of Drt3a, Drt3b, and ncRNA. Drt3a produces the poly(GT) strand using a conserved ACACAC template within the ncRNA. Notably, Drt3b synthesizes a complementary, protein-primed poly(AC) strand in the complete absence of a nucleic acid template, using conserved active site residues specific to Drt3b to enforce precise base alternation. These findings expand the functional landscape of nucleic acid polymerases, revealing a protein-templated mechanism for sequence-specific DNA synthesis.

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

Code as a Weapon: A Consensus-Labeled Prompt Bank for Measuring Coding-Model Compliance with Malicious-Code Requests

A general-purpose language model that answers a harmful question returns text; a coding model that complies with a malicious request can return a working weapon: a keylogger, ransomware, an exploit that runs as written. This asymmetry in the severity of a single act of compliance implies coding-specialized models should clear a higher refusal bar than general-purpose chat models, not a lower one, yet the field cannot tell whether they do. Refusal benchmarks for malicious code are fragmented: they mix requests for executable software with requests for harmful security knowledge and report refusal rates over non-comparable corpora. This paper's central result is that the CODE-versus-KNOWLEDGE classification axis established in a prior four-corpus release remains stable under a substantially expanded corpus pool and an independently refreshed judge panel, evidence that it measures a real construct rather than an artifact of the prompts or judges. Eight corpora spanning diverse elicitation paradigms (direct, jailbreak-decorated, indirect, and agent/interpreter: ASTRA, CySecBench, AdvBench/harmful_behaviors, JailbreakBench, MalwareBench, RedCode, RMCBench, Scam2Prompt) are classified under a five-judge consensus protocol (6,675 prompts x 5 judges = 33,375 calls), reaching Fleiss' kappa = 0.767 [95% CI 0.755, 0.777] ("substantial"). Critically, the panel shares no judge with the prior release (five paid commercial APIs replaced by five open-weight models from five vendors), yet the two panels agree on 94.45% of the 3,133 shared prompts and reach Cohen's kappa = 0.952 [0.942, 0.963] on the 3,031-prompt binary overlap: the axis survives near-total panel replacement. The released bank comprises 4,748 consensus-CODE and 1,923 consensus-KNOWLEDGE prompts, a reliability-quantified benchmark whose central classification axis is shown stable across corpus expansion and judge-panel replacement.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Structure Bioinformatics of Eight Human ATP Synthase Fo Subunits and Their AlphaFold3-Predicted Water-Soluble QTY Analogs

Human mitochondrial ATP synthase is an essential rotary motor enzyme that produces most of the cellular ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Its membrane-embedded Fo sector contains highly hydrophobic transmembrane subunits that are challenging to study in aqueous environments without detergents. This study explores whether applying the QTY code can reduce the hydrophobicity of selected ATP synthase Fo subunits while preserving their overall molecular structures. We applied the QTY code to eight human ATP synthase Fo subunits: ATP6, ATP8, ATPK, ATP68, ATPMK, AT5G1, AT5G2, and AT5G3. Hydrophobic amino acids leucine (L), isoleucine (I), valine (V), and phenylalanine (F) in transmembrane regions were systematically replaced with hydrophilic glutamine (Q), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y). Four native subunits with available CryoEM structures from human ATP synthase (PDB: 8H9S) were superposed with their AlphaFold3-predicted QTY analogs. The native ATP synthase Fo subunits superposed well with their respective QTY analogs. For the CryoEM-native comparisons, RMSD values ranged from 0.565[A] to 2.546[A]. For the AlphaFold3-native comparisons of subunits without CryoEM structures, RMSD values ranged from 0.204[A] to 0.297[A]. Despite substantial QTY substitutions in the transmembrane regions, ranging from 38.89% to 50.79%, the QTY analogs retained similar overall folds, molecular weights, and isoelectric points. Hydrophobic surface analysis showed that the QTY analogs had reduced hydrophobic patches compared with their native counterparts, with average hydrophobicity decreasing from 0.2959 in native proteins to -1.1023 in QTY analogs. These structural bioinformatics studies suggest that the QTY code can be applied to ATP synthase Fo subunits to generate more hydrophilic, potentially water-soluble analogs while preserving overall structural similarity. These results extend the application of the QTY code to the membrane-embedded Fo sector of ATP synthase and provide a foundation for future experimental studies testing whether these QTY analogs can be expressed, purified, and evaluated for assembly or proton-transfer-related functions.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

arXiv:2606.20299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.

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

Quantum optimal control of the Dicke manifold in dipolar Rydberg atom arrays

arXiv:2606.02283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to engineer and control quantum states of many-body systems is a central challenge in quantum information science. For a register of $N$ qubits, the full Hilbert space dimension grows exponentially as $2^N$, rendering generic state preparation and control infeasible without exploiting structure or symmetry. A particularly important and physically motivated restriction is to the fully symmetric subspace, spanned by the Dicke states, which are simultaneous eigenstates of collective spin $J=N/2$. Ensembles of Rydberg atoms interacting via electric dipoles in two-dimensional tweezer arrays form a promising platform for achieving such control. However, the finite range of dipole-dipole interactions poses a challenge to generating and controlling the Dicke manifold because the Hamiltonian incurs leakage from the computational subspace. To counteract this leakage, we perform quantum optimal control algorithms on a truncated Hilbert space according to our newly developed method of ``irrep distillation'' (IRD), which captures the process by which the symmetric subspace couples to leakage error-spaces, using only linear-scaling Hilbert dimension. We implement gradient ascent pulse engineering (GrAPE) on control schemes with little or no local addressing, to generate resourceful states like Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, Dicke, and extremal quantum states. We benchmark each scheme of IRD-GrAPE for its quantum speed limit (QSL), as well as exactly testing pulse fidelities on small system sizes and predicting fidelities using higher-order IRD on larger systems.

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

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.