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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Scalable quantum circuit knitting using a weak-coupling approximation

arXiv:2606.19035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a method for performing distributed quantum computing with controlled approximations. Exact distributed quantum computing requires exponential classical information to reconstruct the quantum process. However, we show how the classical cost is reduced to polynomial if the quantum procedure can be partitioned between a qubit that is weakly coupled the other qubits. We demonstrate our method for a layered circuit based on the circuits used for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm.

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

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora. Standard autoregressive (AR) pretraining overfits severely in this setting, reaching its optimum early and then continuously deteriorating. We investigate data augmentation as a regularizer to mitigate this overfitting and enable productive training for hundreds of epochs on the same data. We introduce three orthogonal categories of augmentation for AR pretraining: token-level noise (masking, random replacement), sequence permutations (right-to-left prediction, Fill-in-the-Middle), and target offset prediction ($x_{t+i}$ for $i > 1$). Through systematic ablations, we find that individual augmentations delay overfitting and lower validation loss relative to the baseline, with random token replacement achieving the best minimum loss among individual methods. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss. Our experiments demonstrate that data augmentations mitigate AR pretraining's data inefficiency and offer a promising solution to the data-constrained regime. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/data-augmentations-for-pretraining

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Data-driven model reveals increased stability of CAG-expanded <i>huntingtin</i> RNA due to MID1 binding

作者:

by Yuhong Liu, Annika Reisbitzer, Domagoj Dorešić, Jan Hasenauer, Sybille Krauß, Tatjana Tchumatchenko RNA-binding proteins (RBP) are important regulators of RNA metabolism. In neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington’s Disease (HD), disrupted RBP-RNA interactions contribute to neuronal dysfunction. One such RBP, Midline 1 (MID1), has been shown to aberrantly associate with mutant huntingtin (Htt) RNA, enhancing its translation, yet the mechanism driving this effect remains unknown. Here, we develop a computational model to understand the role of MID1. Based on previously published data, our model predicts that MID1 increases the stability of the Htt RNA. We experimentally validate this prediction, showing that overexpression of MID1 significantly prolongs the half-life of mutant Htt RNA. Furthermore, we evaluate model refinements, including clustering of MID1-bound RNA, which allow capturing all key observations in the data. Together, we provide a data-driven framework that underlines the importance of RBP-RNA interaction in post-transcriptional regulation. This framework also shows how individual molecular reactions jointly determine RNA stability and protein levels in HD.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Optimizing LOCC Protocols on Product Stiefel Manifold

arXiv:2510.06909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Characterizing the operational limits of Local Operations and Classical Communication (LOCC) is a central problem in distributed quantum information, yet remains computationally intractable due to the non-convex geometry of the LOCC set. We introduce a geometric framework that embeds the physical constraints of fixed-round LOCC protocols onto the product Stiefel manifold, converting a constrained protocol-design problem into unconstrained Riemannian optimization. We demonstrate this framework through entanglement distillation: by directly optimizing finite-copy LOCC protocols, we discover achievable protocols whose fidelities match positive partial transpose (PPT) upper bounds to within numerical precision, and we provide numerical evidence for both the operational advantage of adaptive communication rounds and the super-additivity of coherent information under two-way processing. These results establish Riemannian manifold optimization as a practical tool for probing the physical limits of future quantum networks.

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

PH-KAN: Port-Hamiltonian Kolmogorov-Arnold Network

arXiv:2606.14708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-driven machine learning approaches have become increasingly attractive for nonlinear system identification, but standard models often fail to preserve the underlying physical structure and remain difficult to interpret, especially when no analytical model is available. In this context, port-Hamiltonian (pH) models provide a natural physics-informed representation. However, when these models are parameterized with standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), the learned constitutive components often remain poorly interpretable. In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving identification framework for nonlinear port-Hamiltonian systems based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). The proposed PH-KAN model parameterizes the interconnection matrix, dissipation matrix, Hamiltonian, and input mapping using dedicated KAN blocks, while enforcing the port-Hamiltonian constraints by construction. This yields constitutive representations in which the nonlinear functions defining the identified pH components can be explicitly inspected, leading to a more interpretable model than with standard MLP-based parameterizations.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS): from development to application

Background: Aging has a critical role in lung changes and the outcome of lung disease. Several lung aging equations have been proposed to measure deviation from physiological aging of the respiratory system. In this study, we aimed to develop a single measure of accelerated lung aging and show its application as a measure of lung aging. Method: We used a pre-bronchodilator pulmonary function test (PFT) from NHANES adult participants recruited from 2007 to 2011. We applied Klemera-Dubal Method (KDM) to four PFT measurements, FEV1, FVC, FEF25-75, and PEF, to calculate a measure of lung biological aging. Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS) was calculated from the residual method vs. chronological age. We tested the construct validity of PARS by measuring its association with risk factors of lung health. The prognostic validity was measured using a survival analysis. Sampling weights were applied to all analyses. Results: In 14,123 adult participants, the mean (SD) of accelerated lung age (PARS) was 0 (8.2) years. Participants with a history of asthma and emphysema had 4- and 10-year higher PARS. Cigarette smoking, lower socioeconomic status, black race, higher serum cadmium, and lower serum selenium and magnesium were associated with higher PARS. During 116 months of follow-up, PARS was associated with a higher mortality (HR = 1.06, 95%CI: 1.05-1.07 per year). Females with higher PARS had a higher risk of death (P for interaction < 0.001). Results were consistent across different subgroups and sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: PARS is a noninvasive lung aging marker and can be applied as a single measure of lung accelerated aging in the adult population. Its strong construct and predictive validity support its future application among different populations with and without lung disease.

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

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MAF: Multimodal Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Sentiment Analysis with MLLMs

作者:

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex multimodal content. However, their performance in sentiment analysis exhibits acute sensitivity to prompt design, rendering static, uniformly applied prompts inherently suboptimal for capturing the nuanced multimodal cues that vary across inputs. To address this limitation, we propose a Multimodal Adaptive Few-Shot Prompting (MAF) framework, which dynamically retrieves and integrates query-relevant demonstrations to elicit the sentiment reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in a context-sensitive manner. MAF constructs a demonstration retrieval module that holistically encodes facial expressions, scene context, and textual semantics, with a lip movement amplitude detection mechanism introduced for accurate speaker identification in multi-person scenarios. Departing from conventional fixed-weight fusion, a lightweight coefficient generation network is trained to output query-conditioned fusion weights in real time, enabling weighted aggregation of multimodal similarity scores to retrieve the top-K most informative demonstrations. Prediction stability is further enhanced through majority voting over multiple candidate outputs generated by the MLLM. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAF achieves substantial and consistent performance improvements over the corresponding backbone variants and remains competitive with strong multimodal sentiment-analysis baselines.

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

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Prompt2Effect: Training-Free Image-to-Video Model Specialization via LoRA Generation

Personalizing Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models with specific visual effects is increasingly demanded for high-end video generation. Current practice requires training a separate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for each effect, incurring substantial data curation and iterative optimization costs that hinder interactive control. We present Prompt2Effect, a weight-driven hypernetwork that amortizes per-effect training by directly synthesizing effect-specific LoRA weights in a single forward pass. Unlike prior hypernetworks that regress adapter weights purely from semantics, Prompt2Effect is explicitly conditioned on the frozen base model weights, grounding weight prediction in the structural geometry of each layer. Furthermore, instead of predicting raw LoRA matrices, we introduce an SVD-canonicalized parameterization that resolves factorization ambiguity and stabilizes large-scale weight synthesis. Together, these design principles enable accurate and scalable LoRA prediction for high-dimensional I2V diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Prompt2Effect achieves on-par or superior video quality and effect alignment compared to conventional LoRA fine-tuning, while reducing the computational cost from 56 GPU training hours to 3.3 seconds of hypernetwork inference. When used as initialization for subsequent fine-tuning, our predicted weights further improve final performance and accelerate optimization by approximately 10x.

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

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Finite-Time Queue Peak Laws in Stochastic Networks: Logarithmic Scaling After Geometric Thresholds

arXiv:2606.18218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study finite-horizon queue peaks in generalized switches, a standard stochastic-network model in which many queues share constrained service resources. Arrivals may be dependent, time-varying, and adapted to the past; the standing load condition is uniform interior slack, meaning the conditional mean arrival vector stays in a fixed contraction of the capacity region. We show that this slack reshapes the finite-time peak law for drift-minimizing scheduling policies such as MaxWeight. The square-root envelope that is sharp without slack persists only up to a geometry-dependent threshold; beyond that threshold, the running maximum grows only logarithmically with the horizon, both with high probability and in expectation. The mechanism is self-normalization: in the current queue direction, the projected fluctuation scale is normalized by the stabilizing drift scale. This removes capacity geometry from the logarithmic coefficient, while geometry remains in the threshold. Matching lower bounds show that both the logarithmic term and a geometric threshold are unavoidable. When finite-time state-space collapse is available, the threshold can be sharpened using local bottleneck geometry. For generalized input-queued switches, we obtain finite-time peak bounds with tight logarithmic coefficients. Simulations illustrate the two-phase envelope, local geometric refinements, and variance-sensitive improvements predicted by the theory.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Best Arm Identification with Minimal Regret

arXiv:2409.18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret. This variant of the multi-armed bandit problem elegantly amalgamates two of its most ubiquitous objectives: regret minimization and BAI. More precisely, the agent's goal is to identify the best arm with a prescribed confidence level $\delta$, while minimizing the cumulative regret up to the stopping time. Focusing on single-parameter exponential families of distributions, we leverage information-theoretic techniques to establish an instance-dependent lower bound on the expected cumulative regret. Moreover, we present an impossibility result that underscores the tension between cumulative regret and sample complexity in fixed-confidence BAI. Complementarily, we design and analyze the Double KL-UCB algorithm, which achieves asymptotic optimality as the confidence level tends to zero. Notably, this algorithm employs two distinct confidence bounds to guide arm selection in a randomized manner. Our findings elucidate a fresh perspective on the inherent connections between regret minimization and BAI.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Sharp Favard length of random Cantor sets

arXiv:2512.17753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that for a large class of planar $1$-dimensional random fractals $S$, the Favard length $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))$ of the neighborhood $S(r)$ is comparable to $\log^{-1}(1/r)$, matching a universal lower bound; up to now, this was only known in expectation for a few concrete models. In particular, we show that there exist $1$-Ahlfors regular sets with the fastest possible Favard length decay. For a wide class of planar one-dimensional "grid random fractals", including fractal percolation and its Ahlfors-regular variants, we further show that $\operatorname{Fav}(S(r))/\log(1/r)$ converges almost surely, and we identify the limit explicitly. Furthermore, we prove that for some $1$-dimensional Ahlfors-regular random fractals $S$, the Favard length of $S(r)$ decays instead like $\log\log(1/r)/\log(1/r)$, showing that the $1/\log(1/r)$ decay is not universal among random fractals, as might be expected from previous results.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AdversaBench: Automated LLM Red-Teaming with Multi-Judge Confirmation and Cross-Model Transferability

Scaling adversarial evaluation of large language models requires both a method for generating hard inputs and a reliable way to confirm that resulting failures are real. We present AdversaBench, an end-to-end red-teaming pipeline that mutates seed prompts with five structured operators, queries a target model, and confirms failures through a three-judge panel with a meta-judge tiebreaker. We report experiments on 45 seeds across three categories: reasoning, instruction-following, and tool use. Every seed produced a confirmed failure. Four findings stand out. First, operator effectiveness varies sharply by category: inject_distractor scores 0.00 mean reward on instruction-following seeds but 0.80-0.83 on reasoning and tool-use. Second, binary failure rate hides difficulty: instruction-following seeds required 2.4 attacker iterations on average versus 1.1 for other categories, a gap visible in survival curves. Third, pairwise judge agreement of 80-87% coexists with near-zero Cohen's kappa due to label skew; category-level disagreement rates are more informative. Fourth, adversarial prompts generated against Llama 3.1 8B transfer zero-shot to Llama 3.3 70B, suggesting the mutations exploit general behavioral patterns rather than model-specific weaknesses. Code, dataset, and analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/khanak0509/AdversaBench .

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

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

Orchestra-o1: Omnimodal Agent Orchestration

The recent success of agent swarms has shifted the paradigm of large language model (LLM)-based agents from single-agent workflows to multi-agent systems, highlighting the importance of agent orchestration for task decomposition and collaboration. However, existing orchestration frameworks are limited to a narrow set of modalities and struggle to generalize to more complex settings where heterogeneous modalities coexist and interact. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in omnimodal scenarios, where tasks require the unified understanding and coordination of diverse inputs such as text, image, audio, and video. In this work, we propose Orchestra-o1, an omnimodal agent orchestration framework designed to support efficient agent collaboration across multiple modalities. Orchestra-o1 introduces a unified orchestration mechanism that enables modality-aware task decomposition, online sub-agent specialization, and parallel sub-task execution. This scalable design allows agent systems to effectively tackle complex real-world tasks involving heterogeneous information sources, surpassing the second-best approach by 10.3% accuracy on the OmniGAIA benchmark. Furthermore, we introduce decision-aligned group relative policy optimization (DA-GRPO), an efficient agentic reinforcement learning approach for training Orchestra-o1-8B, which also achieves state-of-the-art performance against all existing open-source omnimodal agents.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Statistical and Numerical Convergence in Stochastic Equilibrium

arXiv:2606.07469v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper sets out the most general computational and econometric implications of the rigorous stochastic equilibrium theory from SELCKE (Staines (2024a)) arXiv:2312.16214. The analytical backbone is the discovery that the system converges geometrically to long-run equilibrium, at a rate given by the greater of the eigenvalue or inverse eigenvalue (from outside) closest to the unit circle and the maximum shock persistence. High-order shocks converge faster. I develop a simulation procedure to test, with asymptotic power, whether stochastic equilibrium exists for a particular model. The fundamental approximation result asserts that, whatever the order of expansion or loss function, the stochastic steady state delivers the most accurate perturbation solution. I also show that super-consistent parameter estimators $O(1/T)$ arise whenever second-order terms vanish. Besides Calvo, I study stochastic equilibrium in two alternative pricing models. Dynamics simplify considerably. I bound the time the impulse response peaks, by the maximum lag in the errors. This lends empirical support to Taylor contracts, although there are issues surrounding unit roots and the strong cost-channel. For menu costs, I demonstrate that the initial price distribution decays away super-exponentially, producing a system equivalent to Calvo with an endogenous reset probability. The impact of idiosyncratic disturbances appears as an additional wedge between actual and efficient output. Blow-up of the objective function at the boundary is proven, with the help of new distributional arguments, so the model meets existing eigenvalue existence conditions for the recursive equilibrium. Along the way, new light is shone on existing theoretical models and statistical procedures.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

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

Rethinking Multimodal Fusion for Time Series: Text Modalities Need Constrained Fusion

arXiv:2603.22372v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal learning have motivated the integration of auxiliary modalities such as text or vision into time series (TS) forecasting. However, most existing methods provide limited gains, often improving performance only in specific datasets or relying on architecture-specific designs that limit generalization. In this paper, we show that multimodal models with naive fusion strategies (e.g., simple addition or concatenation) often underperform unimodal TS models, which we attribute to the uncontrolled integration of auxiliary modalities which may introduce irrelevant information. Motivated by this observation, we explore various constrained fusion methods designed to control such integration and find that they consistently outperform naive fusion methods. Furthermore, we propose Controlled Fusion Adapter (CFA), a simple plug-in method that enables controlled cross-modal interactions without modifying the TS backbone, integrating only relevant textual information aligned with TS dynamics. CFA employs low rank adapters to filter irrelevant textual information before fusing it into temporal representations. We conduct over 20K experiments across various datasets and TS/text models, demonstrating the effectiveness of the constrained fusion methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/seunghan96/cfa.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Synthesizing Arbitrary Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with Stochastic Floquet Engineering

arXiv:2606.15664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The conventional Floquet engineering scheme synthesizes a given target Hamiltonian with a deterministic temporal periodic driving field. In this work, we introduce the stochastic Floquet engineering scheme that can synthesize an arbitrary non-Hermitian target Hamiltonian using a time-periodic driving field with noisy amplitude. Our method is rooted in the Hermitian dynamics taking noise as a valuable quantum resource with no need for loss or gain in prior. We apply our method to engineer a cavity Hamiltonian with dissipative coupling between Fock states, and to prepare a given quantum state from a generally arbitrary quantum state. The stochastic Floqut engineering also provides a way to generate non-unitary quantum gates, which take advantage in certain tasks compared to unitary quantum computing, without the need for ancillae or state-dependent updating.

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

Learning Visually Interpretable Oscillator Networks for Soft Continuum Robots from Video

Learning soft continuum robot (SCR) dynamics from video offers flexibility but existing methods lack interpretability or rely on prior assumptions. Model-based approaches require prior knowledge and manual design. We bridge this gap by introducing: (1) The Attention Broadcast Decoder (ABCD), a plug-and-play module for autoencoder-based latent dynamics learning that generates pixel-accurate attention maps localizing each latent dimension's contribution while filtering static backgrounds, enabling visual interpretability via spatially grounded latents and on-image overlays. (2) Visual Oscillator Networks (VONs), a 2D latent oscillator network coupled to ABCD attention maps for on-image visualization of learned masses, coupling stiffness, and forces, thereby enabling mechanical interpretability. We validate our approach on single- and double-segment SCRs, demonstrating that ABCD-based models significantly improve multi-step prediction accuracy with 5.8x error reduction for Koopman operators and 3.5x for oscillator networks on a two-segment robot. VONs autonomously discover a chain structure of oscillators. This fully data-driven approach yields compact, mechanically interpretable models with potential relevance for future control applications.

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

PostDeg: Placement Beats Parameterization in LayerNorm GNNs

arXiv:2606.14022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LayerNorm-based GNNs routinely erase the topology signals (degree, centrality, $k$-core) that node-selection policies should depend on, but the literature has not located where in the residual block the erasure happens. We answer that question: a positive per-node scalar inserted before LayerNorm is divided out up to a stabilizer term, while the same scalar inserted after LayerNorm reaches the score head as representation magnitude. The surviving slot is the post-LayerNorm position. We instantiate it with PostDeg, a parameter-free post-LayerNorm inverse-degree scale, and pre-register four falsifiers (graphwise scalars, extra LayerNorm, expressive same-slot capacity, backbone-agnostic source) that would reject the rule. PostDeg gains $+3.5\%/+2.5\%/+5.6\%$ over the LN backbone on influence maximization, network dismantling, and maximum independent set, with $10/10$ paired-seed wins per task; none of the four falsifiers fires. The takeaway is that placement, not parameterization, carries the gain – a small invariance check that generalizes to any positive topology scalar in any normalized residual stack.