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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Controlled Quantum Metrology with Anisotropic Heisenberg Spin Interactions under Intrinsic Decoherence

arXiv:2606.16918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate quantum parameter estimation in a two-qubit anisotropic Heisenberg spin system with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction in the presence of intrinsic decoherence described by the Milburn model. Using the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI), we study the estimation of both the uniform magnetic field and the DM interaction strength. Analytical expressions for the time-evolved density matrix are obtained and used to explore the effects of exchange anisotropy, intrinsic decoherence, and probe-state preparation on the achievable estimation precision. Our results show that suitable tuning of the anisotropic exchange coupling and the initial entangled state can considerably enhance the estimation performance, with different optimal parameter regimes emerging for magnetic-field and DM-interaction sensing. To better understand the role of quantum resources in metrology, we also examine the behaviour of concurrence, quantum coherence, and von Neumann entropy. Overall, our findings demonstrate that anisotropic Heisenberg spin systems with DM interaction provide a promising and flexible platform for high-precision quantum metrology even in the presence of intrinsic decoherence.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Correction scheme for molecular total energies from quantum phase estimation under limited qubit resources

arXiv:2603.02715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a practical method for accurately evaluating molecular total energies using a hybrid approach that integrates fault-tolerant quantum computers with classical computing. Our scheme consists of two complementary components: quantum dominant orbital selection (QDOS) and subspace dynamical correlation (SDC). QDOS extracts only the essential active orbitals from the complete active space (CAS) configuration interaction (CI) state on a quantum computer, yielding a compact active space suitable for classical CASCI calculations. SDC then evaluates dynamical-correlation corrections for the CASCI energy using this compact state, which remains tractable on classical machines. To demonstrate that the CAS energy obtained on a quantum computer can be post-corrected by SDC, we examine two frameworks: multireference perturbation theory and tailored coupled-cluster theory. Our scheme enables effective treatment of relatively large molecular systems by combining limited quantum and classical resources.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Data-Centric Framework for Detecting and Correcting Corrupted Labels

arXiv:2606.11699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of machine learning and deep learning models largely depends on the quality of the training data. However, the quality of the real-world datasets is often compromised by noisy labels, which can substantially degrade model accuracy and reliability. To address this challenge, we propose Relabeler, an end-to-end data-centric framework for detecting and correcting corrupted labels. For corrupted label detection, Relabeler jointly leverages both local and global relationships among data instances to identify potentially noisy samples. After detecting suspicious instances, Relabeler further performs label correction by estimating the most probable clean label for each instance based on both its input features and observed noisy label. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, noise types, and noise rates demonstrate that Relabeler consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 58% improvement in label correction precision and 6% improvement in downstream task performance.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Syndrome aware mitigation of logical errors

arXiv:2512.23810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broad applications of quantum computers will require error correction (EC). However, hardware roadmaps indicate that physical qubit numbers will remain limited in the foreseeable future, leading to residual logical errors that constrain the size and accuracy of achievable computations. Recent work suggested logical error mitigation (LEM), which applies known error mitigation (EM) methods to logical errors, eliminating their effect at the cost of a runtime overhead. We introduce syndrome-aware logical error mitigation (SALEM), which mitigates logical errors conditioned on the error syndromes measured during error correction. The runtime overhead of SALEM is exponentially lower than that of LEM schemes which do not make use of syndrome data, enabling substantially larger circuit volumes that can be executed accurately. Compared to the routinely used combination of error correction and syndrome rejection (post-selection), SALEM increases the size of reliably executable computations by orders of magnitude. In the practical setting where space and time overheads are fixed and error reduction methods are compared by their resulting estimation errors, we observe a surprising phenomenon: SALEM, which tightly combines EC with EM, can outperform physical EM even above the standard fault-tolerance (pseudo) threshold. Thus, SALEM can make use of EC in regimes of physical error rates where EC is commonly deemed useless.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Model-based inference of gene expression noise from single-cell RNA-sequencing data

The heterogeneity of expression levels among genetically identical cells, termed gene expression noise, is a property of the gene expression process whose importance in the biology of organisms and their evolution is increasingly recognized. Measuring gene expression noise requires single-cell expression data, as obtained from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNASeq). Its estimation, however, is challenging owing to (i) the presence of technical noise in addition to biological noise, and (ii) the heterogeneity of cell types in the sampled population. We propose a maximum-likelihood framework to infer biological noise from scRNASeq data, while accounting for technical noise, dropout probabilities, and distinct cell sequencing depths. We demonstrate the parameter identifiability using simulations and that the resulting noise estimates are uncorrelated from the mean gene expression, and therefore do not need extra correction in downstream analyses, easing intra- and inter- genome comparisons. Using two technical replicates of scRNASeq data from the wild yeast *Saccharomyces paradoxus*, we show that expression noise can be inferred in a reproducible manner.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Multi-Bitwidth Quantization for LLMs Using Additive Codebooks

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across heterogeneous hardware with varying resource constraints, the ability to adaptively manage the trade-off between performance and efficiency without retraining is critical. We propose Drop-by-Drop, a novel multi-bitwidth post-training quantization framework that enables inference-time precision control over LLM weights from a single trained model. Our method is theoretically grounded in information theory and successive refinement. We establish that LLM weights, which commonly follow a Gaussian distribution, can be optimally reconstructed with increasing fidelity as additional bits are incorporated, under a weighted mean squared error distortion motivated by LLM loss functions. To realize this in practice, Drop-by-Drop incorporates Matryoshka-style supervision into the loss function, exploiting the structure of additive codebooks. Drop-by-Drop produces a single model where ordered subsets of codebooks yield accurate partial reconstructions at each precision level. This approach significantly reduces storage and memory overhead by allowing a single checkpoint to serve multiple bitwidths, while maintaining competitive perplexity and accuracy across major architectures, such as Qwen, LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Listening makes Vision Clear for VLMs

arXiv:2606.23763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work typically assesses vision–language consistency using attention distributions of answer-side tokens. However, we observe that highest attention regions are not always consistent with the intended semantic token. This probably stems from decoding drift, where language priors from previously generated answer tokens accumulate and mismatch with visual attention. Besides the priors from previous answer tokens, we find that structural tokens, e.g., modality boundary markers, may encompass the entire context and generate high attention to areas unrelated to the target. To avoid these distortions and provide consistency evaluation for large VLMs, we adopt prompt-side semantics and propose Prompt-Vision Token Activation Map (PV-TAM). PV-TAM further incorporates a filter to remove systematic bias induced by modality boundary markers. Unlike traditional methods that evaluate overlap solely through masks while ignoring activation intensity, our metrics leverage the peak distribution of attention to measure the alignment between prompts and visual regions. In experiments, PV-TAM consistently improves both attention-based and IoU-style localization metrics over answer-side baselines on various datasets.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ECA: Efficient Continual Alignment for Open-Ended Image-to-Text Generation

Incremental Learning (IL) for Open-ended Image-to-Text Generation (OpenITG) enables models to continuously generate accurate, contextually relevant text for new images while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Unlike prior studies, this paper addresses a more practical scenario in which the predominant category of visual data shifts over time as environments evolve. In this context, we introduce a new notion of continual alignment, which incrementally adapts the alignment module within pre-trained VLMs to preserve high-quality cross-modal representations. Based on this idea, we propose Efficient Continual Alignment (ECA), a novel exemplar-free IL approach for OpenITG. The key challenge is enabling the model to acquire new, task-specific features while minimizing interference with the established alignment without accessing raw data from previous tasks. To address this, ECA employs three core mechanisms: a Mixture of Query (MoQ) module that adapts task-specific query tokens, a Fisher Dynamic Expansion (FeDEx) that dynamically expands model structure based on a Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based metric, and an embedding dictionary with Dictionary Replay (DR) to retain past knowledge. To evaluate ECA's performance, we construct four new IL OpenITG benchmarks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ECA significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and improves IL performance compared to baseline methods. Code and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/Snowball0823/ECA.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

12.
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.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

arXiv:2606.11553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.

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

Adaptable Segmentation Pipeline for Diverse Brain Tumors with Radiomic-Guided Subtyping and Lesion-Wise Model Ensemble

Robust and generalizable segmentation of brain tumors on multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains difficult because tumor types differ widely. The BraTS 2025 Lighthouse Challenge benchmarks segmentation methods on diverse high-quality datasets of adult and pediatric tumors: multi-consortium international pediatric brain tumor segmentation (PED), preoperative meningioma tumor segmentation (MEN), meningioma radiotherapy segmentation (MEN-RT), and segmentation of pre- and post-treatment brain metastases (MET). We present a flexible, modular, and adaptable pipeline that improves segmentation performance by selecting and combining state-of-the-art models and applying tumor- and lesion-specific processing before and after training. Radiomic features extracted from MRI help detect tumor subtype, ensuring a more balanced training. Custom lesion-level performance metrics determine the influence of each model in the ensemble and optimize post-processing that further refines the predictions, enabling the workflow to tailor every step to each case. On the BraTS testing sets, our pipeline achieved performance comparable to top-ranked algorithms across multiple challenges. These findings confirm that custom lesion-aware processing and model selection yield robust segmentations yet without locking the method to a specific network architecture. Our method has the potential for quantitative tumor measurement in clinical practice, supporting diagnosis and prognosis.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Information Geometry of Multicomponent Superconducting Fluctuation Transport

arXiv:2606.15928v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum geometry underlies many electronic responses, but its transport signatures have so far been established mainly for pure single-particle Bloch states. Whether collective many-body fluctuations possess a measurable quantum geometry remains largely unexplored. Here we show that superconducting fluctuation transport provides a direct probe of quantum information geometry in collective many-body matter. Starting from a multicomponent time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory in the Gaussian fluctuation regime, we identify the equilibrium density matrix of fluctuating Cooper pairs as the static pair propagator, which defines a positive mixed-state manifold in momentum space. The geometry of this manifold is directly measurable through paraconductivity: the longitudinal paraconductivity is governed by the quantum Fisher information of superconducting fluctuation modes, while the fluctuational anomalous Hall effect is governed by the mean Uhlmann curvature, the mixed-state counterpart of Berry curvature. This correspondence further yields geometric bounds between these two transport components, with no direct analogue in normal electronic transport. Applied to chiral superconducting fluctuations in quarter-metal systems motivated by rhombohedral multilayer graphene, a symmetry-allowed Lifshitz invariant generates finite mean Uhlmann curvature and logarithmically enhances the anomalous Hall conductivity above the critical temperature. Our results establish collective superconducting fluctuations as an experimentally accessible transport probe of mixed-state quantum information geometry.

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

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

arXiv:2603.00656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and insufficient advantage signals within rollout groups. A feasible approach is to identify valuable interaction turns at a fine granularity to drive more targeted learning. To address this, we introduce InfoPO (Information-Driven Policy Optimization), which frames multi-turn interaction as a process of active uncertainty reduction and computes an information-gain reward that credits turns whose feedback measurably changes the agent's subsequent action distribution compared to a masked-feedback counterfactual. It then combines this signal with task outcomes via an adaptive variance-gated fusion to identify information importance while maintaining task-oriented goal direction. Across diverse tasks, including intent clarification, collaborative coding, and tool-augmented decision making, InfoPO consistently outperforms prompting and multi-turn RL baselines. It also demonstrates robustness under user simulator shifts and generalizes effectively to environment-interactive tasks. Overall, InfoPO provides a principled and scalable mechanism for optimizing complex agent-user collaboration. Code is available at https://github.com/kfq20/InfoPO.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Iron deficiency testing among people with incident heart failure in primary care

Background: Given around 50% of people with heart failure have a degree of iron deficiency, guidelines recommend screening. It is uncertain to what extent this is done in primary care and whether testing is equitable. Aim: To report the proportion of people with incident heart failure who undergo a ferritin test within 12 months. Design and setting: Retrospective primary care cohort study using Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum data, between 2016 and 2021. Methods: We report the proportion of adults with an incident diagnosis of heart failure who received a ferritin test within 12 months. Multivariable logistic regression was used to examine the odds of testing based on key demographic covariates and co-morbidities. Results: Among 105,749 individuals with an incident diagnosis of heart failure (mean age 71.6 years, SD 14.3), only 35,688 (33.7%) received a ferritin test within the subsequent year. Increasing age (odds ratio 1.25 per 10-year increase, 95% CI: 1.24-1.27), female sex (male sex OR 0.86, 0.84-0.89) and Asian ethnicity (OR 1.70, 1.59-1.80) were all associated with increased odds of testing as were diagnoses of coeliac disease (OR 1.86, 1.58-2.21), type 1 diabetes (OR 1.82, 1.51-2.19) and cirrhosis (OR 1.64, 1.43-1.87). There was geographic variation in testing, even in adjusted analyses. Conclusion: In a large primary care dataset, two thirds of people with incident heart failure did not receive a ferritin test for iron deficiency within a year of diagnosis demonstrating a gap in current practice and an opportunity for improvements in service delivery.

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

The one-point Schreier Poisson boundary of Thompson's group $F$

arXiv:2606.23896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify the Poisson boundary of the one-point Schreier-chain random walk obtained by projecting the simple symmetric random walk on Thompson's group $F$ to the dyadic orbit point $1/2$. For the associated simple labelled-generator walk on the dyadic Schreier graph, the full Poisson boundary is the skeleton end boundary. The proof combines the known description of this Schreier graph as a binary-tree skeleton with recurrent one-dimensional ray attachments with an explicit trace computation. After tracing to the grey skeleton and deleting holding probabilities, the walk becomes a reversible nearest-neighbor walk on the rooted binary tree with two unequal classes of edge conductance. This reduces the boundary identification to standard Poisson–Martin theory for transient walks on trees and leaves a finite electrical-network calculation for the harmonic measure. Following Kaimanovich's coding of skeleton ends by odd 2-adic integers [{Groups, Graphs and Random Walks}, London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Ser.~436, pp.~300–342, 2017], the hitting measure is a biased Bernoulli product measure with explicitly computed bias. It is singular with respect to Haar measure, has full topological support, and is exact-dimensional; these properties and the exact constants are proved here.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

GRACE: Gated Refinement for Accurate Causal Edge Discovery in High-Dimensional Time Series

arXiv:2606.23880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: From climate teleconnections to gene regulation, modern time-series datasets encompass tens or hundreds of interacting variables, making causal discovery increasingly challenging. Constraint-based methods offer statistical rigor but their nonlinear CI tests are infeasible at scale, while score-based alternatives avoid CI testing but require arbitrary thresholds to binarize continuous edge scores. We propose GRACE ($G$ated $R$efinement for $A$ccurate $C$ausal $E$dge discovery), which refines constraint-based discovery using Hard Concrete gates with $L_0$ regularization: each candidate edge has an independent gate whose values concentrate near 0 or 1, yielding a clean bimodal separation that makes the binary decision robust, unlike the narrow, overlapping score distributions produced by $L_1$ and attention-based methods. A fast linear CI skeleton provides high-recall candidates; a single gated model then prunes false positives by learning which edges genuinely improve prediction, with automatic regularization adapted to problem dimensions and skeleton density. Systematic experiments on synthetic benchmarks, spanning diverse graph topologies (scale-free, Erdős-R'enyi, small-world) and dimensionalities up to $d=100$, show that GRACE substantially improves F1 over its base CI method while maintaining high precision, and outperforms attention-based and score-based alternatives. GRACE matches or exceeds expensive nonlinear CI tests at a fraction of the cost ($75\times$ faster). On a real-world river flow dataset, where rainfall confounders, variable propagation lags, and distributional shifts violate standard assumptions, a temporal bootstrap variant of GRACE recovers 9 of 11 causal edges along the Elbe River with only 1 false positive ($F_1 = 0.86$, AUROC${} = 0.99$), reducing the skeleton's 106 false positives by 99%.

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

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efimov Effect in Ultracold Microwave-Shielded Polar Molecules

arXiv:2602.21433v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A quantum-mechanical description is presented for the three-body physics of shielded dipolar molecules, including a prediction of observable Efimov physics. Despite the anisotropic and long-range nature of the interaction, shielding enables a regime in which universality emerges already at the two-body level and extends to the three-body sector, where Efimov physics emerges. On the negative side of the scattering-length resonance, computed trimer binding energies display the characteristic scaling expected for Efimov resonances. Finally, the sudden approximation can be used to create trimer bound states, starting from positive energy trap states as a way to create or detect these molecular trimers. Moreover, the three-body parameter expressed in dipolar units is found to be universal.