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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A Tanaka-Type Formula for Compact Sets and Equilibrium Measures of L\'{e}vy Processes

arXiv:2606.17472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tanaka's formula is a classical identity for Brownian motion, and Tsukada (2018) extended it to L\'{e}vy processes not necessarily symmetric. From a potential-theoretic point of view, this formula shows that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting a singleton can be decomposed into the sum of a martingale part and a local time. In this paper, we generalize this singleton setting and derive a Tanaka-type formula for a compact set $B$. To this end, we introduce the equilibrium measure, defined as the rescaled limit of the $q$-capacity measures, and show that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting $B$ can be represented as the integral, with respect to the equilibrium measure, of the invariant functions associated with processes killed upon hitting singletons, up to an additive constant called the Robin constant. Moreover, when $B$ is an interval, we obtain explicit representations of the equilibrium measure, the Robin constant, and the martingale part for recurrent stable processes as well as for recurrent spectrally negative L\'{e}vy processes. Finally, we discuss how an analogous Tanaka-type formula can also be established for transient L\'{e}vy processes.

02.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Efficient site-specific gene addition using R2 retrotransposons in tobacco and rice

作者:

Precise integration of multikilobase DNA fragments remains a major technical barrier in plants. Here we introduce non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) R2 retrotransposons as a versatile system for targeted gene integration in plants. We reconstituted R2 activity in Nicotiana benthamiana and benchmarked insertion efficiency and fidelity using a TMV-based episomal reporter system. We demonstrate site-specific integration of GFP (2.2 kb) and recombinase-compatible landing pads (0.6 kb) into 28S rDNA arrays, with intact cassette insertion frequencies up to 75% and 53%, respectively. To temporally constrain donor availability and avoid DNA intermediates, we combined in planta effector expression with recombinant RNA virus-mediated donor delivery. We apply R2 retrotransposons for targeted insertion of resistance cassettes within the rDNA of rice callus, achieving integration efficiencies up to 17%. These results position R2 retrotransposons as a double-strand break-free system for RNA-templated insertion of multikilobase gene cassettes at rDNA loci, for safe-harbor trait stacking in plants with potential applications in crop improvement and synthetic biology. Retrotransposons are applied in plants for safe-harbor transgene integration.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A novel Framework for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Recognition using CLIP

To address the limitations of existing open-vocabulary object recognition methods, including high system complexity, substantial training costs, and limited generalization capability, this paper proposes a novel Open-Vocabulary Object Recognition (OVOR) framework based on a streamlined two-stage strategy: object segmentation followed by recognition. The proposed framework eliminates the need for complex retraining procedures and labor-intensive annotation. After extracting object regions, object-level image embeddings and category-level text embeddings are generated using CLIP, enabling recognition over arbitrary vocabularies. To reduce dependence on CLIP and enhance encoding flexibility, we further introduce a CNN/MLP-based approach that extracts convolutional neural network (CNN) feature maps and employs a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to align visual features with text embeddings. The resulting embeddings are then concatenated for cross-modal matching. Finally, object recognition is performed through similarity matching between image and text embeddings. Experiments on COCO, Pascal VOC, and ADE20K demonstrate that CLIP-based image encoding achieves the highest average AP, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, the results reveal the potential of CLIP-independent image encoding as a promising alternative for OVOR.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CoRe: A Continuously Reward-Finetuned LLM Query Rewriter for Multi-Stage Context-Aware Relevance in Web-Scale Video Search

LLM-based query rewriters in production face a tension: the training reward must reflect how the rewrite is consumed by the production ranker, yet the training procedure must be cheap enough to support continuous redeployment as data drifts. We present CoRe (Context Relevance), such a system, redeployed weekly for over five months in a major short-video search engine. Our reward uses the deployed multimodal relevance model as its source and a multiplicative ratio form mirroring the production fusion algebra, closing the simulation-production gap that offline reward proxies leave open. A semi-online Mixed Preference Optimization loop makes this reward affordable at multi-million-instance weekly scale: a DPO-style pairwise objective restricts the gradient pass to a small top-k/bottom-k subset of sampled trajectories, and a phase structure reduces trainer/inference-server parameter syncs from per-step to per-phase. An automated promotion gate over reward-like and stability metrics detected and recovered from a real reward-hacking incident in production. Rewriter output is consumed as parallel relevance signals at recall, rawrank, and finerank without displacing the original signals, bounding rewriter-failure blast radius. Online A/B from two sequential production launches, first deploying the rewriter at finerank, then extending consumption to recall and rawrank, delivers statistically significant reductions in change-query rate on rewrite-impacted queries, with all headline relevance and engagement metrics moving in the expected direction.

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

Beyond the Sampled Token: Preserving Candidate Support in RLVR

arXiv:2510.14807v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit exploration collapse in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), from the perspective of the candidate distribution for next-token prediction. We formally show that as probability concentrates on the top-$1$ candidate, the expected number of distinct responses collapses to one regardless of the sampling budget $K$. This theoretical implication is further verified by our empirical tracking of top-$N$ candidate probabilities during training, where the top-$1$ candidate progressively dominates while plausible alternatives are suppressed. These findings suggest a key desideratum for effective exploration: preserving non-negligible probability mass on the top-$N$ candidates. To this end, we propose Candidate-aware Support Preservation (CaSP), with two complementary designs. Specifically, CaSP redistributes positive gradients among top-$N$ candidates for correct responses, and applies a stronger penalty to the top-$1$ candidate for incorrect responses. Unlike many exploration-oriented methods that improve pass@$K$ at the cost of pass@1, CaSP improves pass@$K$ across the full $K$ spectrum. These gains generalize to 6 math, 2 logical-reasoning, and 2 coding benchmarks, and scales to 32B-parameter models and sampling budgets up to $K=1024$, positioning it as a principled, candidate-level approach for RLVR exploration.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Hormonal Contraceptives Drive Genital Lipid Metabolism Reprogramming and Susceptibility to HIV Infection

Heterosexual genital HIV transmission is a major driver of new infections, particularly in women, making them disproportionately vulnerable to HIV acquisition. Previous studies have associated injectable hormonal contraceptives (HC) with increasing susceptibility to HIV. Yet, the underlying molecular mechanism remains incompletely understood. Given the structural and signaling role of lipids in the female genital tract, cervicovaginal lipidomic profiling has the potential to reveal the mechanistic interplay among HC, lipidome, and HIV susceptibility in the female genital tract. We conducted untargeted cervicovaginal lipidomics study in a cohort of high-risk, HIV-negative, Kenyan sex workers who were using injectable depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA), oral contraceptive pill (OCP), or no hormonal contraception (NH). Genital lipids were quantitatively analyzed using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) and bioinformatics platforms. A total of 1045 lipid species were identified in the cervicovaginal lavage samples. Injectable DMPA significantly downregulated major structural and signaling membrane lipids, including phospholipids, ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids (p

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Model Forensics: Investigating Whether Concerning Behavior Reflects Misalignment

arXiv:2606.26071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of safety research is determining whether a model is misaligned. Prior work has largely focused on detecting concerning behavior. But behavior alone does not establish misalignment: a concerning action can arise from benign causes such as confusion. This motivates model forensics: investigating whether the action was driven by malign intent. In this paper, we propose a baseline protocol for model forensics consisting of two steps, iterated as needed. First, we read the chain of thought (CoT) to generate hypotheses about what drives model behavior. Second, we make edits to the prompt or environment to test these hypotheses. While the CoT is not always faithful, it is a rich source of unsupervised insight that can guide the collection of more rigorous evidence. To evaluate our protocol, we create a suite of six agentic environments where models exhibit concerning behavior, and apply it to each. We establish that Kimi K2 Thinking takes shortcuts due to a genuine disposition towards low-effort actions, by showing this hypothesis successfully predicts its behavior. Through counterfactual experiments, we show DeepSeek R1 deceives out of a desire to be consistent with a previous instance of itself. Our methods nonetheless leave significant room for refinement. For example, when we test whether Kimi K2 Thinking believes it is violating user intent, we find no evidence of such a belief, but without positive controls we cannot confirm our tests would detect it. Overall, we find our simple protocol provides a strong baseline that we hope future work will improve upon. More broadly, our work is a concrete step in developing the growing field of model forensics.

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

Noise-Aware Boundary-Enhanced Generative Learning for Ultrasound Speckle Reduction

Ultrasound is a non-invasive, real-time, and cost-effective imaging technique widely used in clinical diagnosis. However, its diagnostic efficacy is often compromised by inherent speckle noise that degrades image quality and obscures underlying anatomical structures. Existing speckle reduction methods tend to over-smooth tissue boundaries and generalize poorly to heterogeneous noise levels. To address these limitations, we propose a Noise-Aware Boundary-Enhanced Generative Learning (NBGL) framework for ultrasound speckle reduction, which simultaneously preserves annotated anatomical boundaries and adapts to varying noise levels. The NBGL framework consists of a speckle reduction branch and a boundary enhancement branch. The former leverages generative learning to suppress speckle noise, while the latter learns boundary-sensitive representations to preserve target anatomical structures. Furthermore, a noise-aware interaction weight generation (NIWG) module estimates the speckle noise level via 3D Laplacian filtering and a median absolute deviation estimator, and translates it into an adaptive interaction weight. This weight is incorporated into a weighted feature-wise linear modulation (wFiLM) module to adaptively modulate cross-branch feature coupling, thereby improving robustness to varying noise levels. Extensive evaluations on 141 3D transvaginal ultrasound volumes demonstrate that NBGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speckle reduction and structural preservation across six noise levels, while maintaining consistency with annotated anatomical boundaries.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The classical boundaries of the EPR argument and quantum ontology

arXiv:2606.07826v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Von Neumann's Hilbert-space formalism of quantum mechanics constitutes a logico-physical theory of observed or measured reality. Imposing the logical constraint of Booleanity, essential for objectively shareable descriptions among observers, reveals the physical meaning of classicality inherently embedded within the formalism itself. Starting from this consideration, the present work reformulates the quantum-classical transition via Hilbert-space classical mechanics (HCM), grounding classicality not in the dynamical limit ($\hbar \to 0$), but in the logical constraint of Booleanity (i.e., the mutual commutativity of preparable states). Within this state-centric framework, applying the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) criterion alongside locality and measurement independence reduces standard quantum mechanics to the HCM model. Thus, the EPR argument reveals not quantum incompleteness, but the implicit classical boundaries of its own premises. To resolve this impasse, we articulate a nuanced quantum ontology grounded in a fundamental structural bipartition between the observational environment and the observed object, which accommodates three categorical distinctions: ontic, processional, and tropos-existential. Building on this, we propose a criterion of objective reality wherein descriptive objectivity is treated as merely a sufficient condition for physical reality. This addresses the historical Bohr-Einstein ambiguity, enabling the quantum formalism to ontologically unify objective measured phenomena and non-objective observed interference within a context-dependent framework.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Breaking the Filter Bubble: A Semantic Pareto-DQN Framework for Multi-Objective Recommendation

arXiv:2606.24042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recommender systems often induce filter bubbles and semantic homogenization by monolithically optimizing for immediate user engagement. Standard single-objective models, including traditional Deep Q-Networks, are ill-equipped to navigate the trade-offs between platform retention and critical societal values like information diversity and provider fairness. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that formalizes recommendation as a semantic multi-objective Markov decision process. By integrating high-fidelity semantic embeddings with a Pareto-DQN agent, our architecture treats engagement, diversity, and fairness as distinct, non-aggregable reward signals, avoiding the pitfalls of static reward scalarization. Empirical evaluations on the MovieLens small dataset shows that our hypervolume based action selection disrupts the feedback loops responsible for semantic collapse. By sustaining high state-trajectory variance, the Pareto-DQN effectively maps the Pareto frontier, achieving gains in auxiliary societal objectives with only marginal impacts on engagement. This work provides a path toward intrinsically aligned, responsible recommender systems.

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

An Analysis of Speculative Window Decoders for Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.24048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing is essential for realizing the substantial computational speedups that quantum computing can bring, but it requires real-time error decoding with high performance. Speculative window decoding improves performance by reducing the time spent waiting for dependencies from prior decoding windows. However, speculative decoders have only been evaluated under the regime of superconducting qubits with fast gate speeds, surface codes, and matching decoders. Since different quantum technologies can have slower gate speeds, we evaluate the performance of speculative decoding under slow gate speeds. We also examine its sensitivity to speculation accuracy, decoder latency, processor count, and workload parallelism, which can vary across different quantum error correction codes, decoders, and hardware platforms. This work presents design principles for identifying when speculative decoding yields the greatest performance improvements. It also reveals the conditions under which non-speculative decoders outperform speculative decoders.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Identifying anaphylaxis using weakly-supervised prediction models and natural language processing

Objectives Scalable computable phenotyping algorithms are critical for conducting high-throughput disease-outcome research in large, distributed-data electronic health record (EHR) and claims data settings. We developed and evaluated a claims- and EHR-based computable phenotyping algorithm for anaphylaxis, a rare acute condition that is challenging to accurately identify using claims data alone. Materials and Methods Potential anaphylaxis events came from two healthcare systems (Kaiser Permanente Washington [KPWA] and Vanderbilt University Medical Center [VUMC]). We engineered features from clinical text using automated natural language processing (NLP) methods. We then developed a phenotyping algorithm using four NLP- and diagnosis code-based silver labels (proxies for the gold-standard labels). Gold-standard abstracted outcomes were used to evaluate algorithm performance. Results The largest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.931 for an NLP-based silver-label model at KPWA. Depending on the model and healthcare system site, positive predictive value (PPV) and sensitivity at the threshold of predicted probability that maximized F1 score ranged from 0.52 to 0.77 (PPV) and 0.78 to 1 (sensitivity). Discussion NLP-based silver-label models had large AUC at KPWA but not at VUMC. This may be because clinical text at KPWA is only available for outpatient encounters and secure messaging. High sensitivity for identifying anaphylaxis can be obtained using our best-performing models. Conclusion The best-performing models had better PPV and sensitivity tradeoffs than prior bespoke anaphylaxis models with costly, manually curated features. The simplicity of the approach compared to traditional phenotyping methods allows it to be deployed easily at multiple health care systems.

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

Remember, Don't Re-read: Stateful ReAct Agents for Token-Efficient Autonomous Experimentation

arXiv:2606.14945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The autoresearch pattern enables autonomous experimentation by having a large language model (LLM) iteratively modify code to optimize a target metric. Its stateless design, however, reconstructs experimental context from scratch at every iteration, incurring $O(n)$ token cost per iteration and $O(n^{2})$ total. This work reformulates the pattern as a stateful ReAct agent using LangGraph, where typed persistent state carries experimental history across iterations via a tool-calling interface. Two benchmarks are evaluated: hyperparameter tuning (15 iterations, small per-iteration observations) and code performance optimization (40 iterations, large per-iteration observations containing full source code and benchmark results). On hyperparameter tuning, the stateful agent consumes 90\% fewer tokens (2{,}492 vs.\ 24{,}465). On code optimization, the stateful agent consumes 52\% fewer tokens (627K vs.\ 1{,}275K) while achieving comparable optimization quality on both tasks. The token reduction is structural: the stateless agent re-reads the full history at $O(n)$ cost per iteration, while the stateful agent operates within a fixed-size conversation window at $O(1)$ cost. This paper describes the architecture in sufficient detail for practitioners to implement a stateful autoresearch agent for their own workflows.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic versus traditional in-person fracture clinic care for adults with acute simple fractures: a protocol for a health economic evaluation within the RECITAL trial

ABSTRACT Introduction Traditional in-person fracture clinics are often overcrowded and inconvenient for patients. Virtual fracture clinics aim to address some of these concerns by improving the efficiency of the orthopaedic service and reducing unnecessary interventions while maintaining safety and quality of care. The RECITAL trial is a non-inferiority randomised controlled trial comparing follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic for people with acute simple fractures to follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. This study describes the protocol for an economic evaluation of RECITAL where the primary aim is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of a virtual fracture clinic compared with traditional in-person fracture clinic care from a health system perspective. Methods and analysis The RECITAL trial recruited 312 participants with acute simple fractures and randomised them to receive follow-up care provided at a virtual fracture clinic or follow-up care provided at an in-person fracture clinic. We will conduct a within-trial analysis from a health system perspective (primary analysis), as well as a health service, patient and societal perspective. The economic evaluation will estimate the difference in the cost of resource inputs on an intention to treat basis used by participants in the two arms of the trial, allowing comparisons to be made between the in-person and virtual fracture clinics. Data for intervention costs and healthcare utilisation will be collected from trial records, hospital electronic medical records and district performance units. The results of the economic evaluation will be expressed in terms of incremental cost per utility weight gained at 12 weeks and will be plotted on a cost-effectiveness plane. Bootstrapping by resampling will be used to estimate 95% confidence intervals around costs and outcomes, and to calculate the confidence intervals around the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio. A cost-effectiveness acceptability curve (CEAC) will be plotted, which will provide information about the probability that an intervention is cost-effective, given the level of a decision makers willingness to pay for each additional outcome. Ethics and Dissemination The trail was approved by the SLHD Ethics Review Committee (RPAH Zone) (X23-0200 and 2023/ETH01038). The findings will be disseminated through a peer-reviewed journal and conference presentations. Trial registration number The trial was prospectively registered on the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ANZCTR; 12623000934640)

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

What Do Language Priors Contribute to Darcy-Flow Inversion? A Mechanistic Audit

arXiv:2606.24967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In ill-posed inverse problems, the recovered solution depends as much on the prior as on the data, yet much of the engineering knowledge that could serve as that prior is recorded qualitatively rather than in formal mathematical form. Here we test whether sentence embeddings can act as an inference-time interface for injecting geological descriptions into a learned Darcy-flow inverse solver. Across six synthetic geological classes and an exploratory transfer to a benchmark reservoir model (SPE10), we vary only the conditioning representation and find that text conditioning reduces reconstruction error by 81 % relative to a no-text counterfactual. Most of this gain comes from a categorical, class-level constraint whose value concentrates where the hydraulic head leaves the conductivity field underdetermined, while within-class geometric detail is secondary and pattern-dependent. Compared with a discrete class label, sentence embeddings add little dense-observation accuracy but improve training stability and enable paraphrase-based sensitivity analysis and open-vocabulary inputs. These results show that language priors can serve as an engineering-informatics interface for injecting geological knowledge into learned inverse solvers, while clarifying when they help and what signal they actually carry.

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

Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation in Superposition

arXiv:2606.14673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether the Compressed Computation (CC) toy model (Braun et al., 2025) is an instance of computation in superposition. The CC model appears to compute 100 ReLU functions with just 50 neurons, achieving a better loss than expected from only representing 50 ReLU functions. We show that the model mixes inputs via its noisy residual stream, corresponding to an unintended mixing matrix in the labels. Splitting the training objective into the ReLU term and the mixing term, we find that performance gains scale with the magnitude of the mixing matrix and vanish when the matrix is removed. The learned neuron directions concentrate in the subspace associated with the top 50 eigenvalues of the mixing matrix, suggesting that the mixing term governs the solution. Finally, a semi-non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF) baseline derived solely from the mixing matrix reproduces the qualitative loss profile and improves on prior baselines, though it does not match the trained model. These results suggest CC is not a suitable toy model of computation in superposition.

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

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Quantization Robustness of Monotone Operator Equilibrium Networks

arXiv:2603.10562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monotone operator equilibrium networks are implicit-layer models whose output is the unique equilibrium of a monotone operator, guaranteeing existence, uniqueness, and convergence. When deployed on low-precision hardware, weights are quantized, potentially destroying these guarantees. We analyze weight quantization as a spectral perturbation of the underlying monotone inclusion. Convergence of the quantized solver is guaranteed whenever the spectral-norm weight perturbation is smaller than the monotonicity margin; the displacement between quantized and full-precision equilibria is bounded in terms of the perturbation size and margin; and a condition number characterizing the ratio of the operator norm to the margin links quantization precision to forward error. MNIST experiments confirm a phase transition at the predicted threshold: three- and four-bit post-training quantization diverge, while five-bit and above converge. The backward-pass guarantee enables quantization-aware training, which recovers provable convergence at four bits.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Introduction to matrix-product states and tensor networks

arXiv:2606.24803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: These notes provide an introduction to tensor-network methods in quantum many-body physics, with an emphasis on matrix-product states (MPS). They develop the basic tensor-network language, including graphical notation, virtual indices, bond dimensions, gauge freedom, canonical forms, QR and singular-value decompositions, and the role of entanglement in controlling the efficiency of the representation. The main MPS algorithms are then introduced, including contractions, correlation functions, matrix-product operators, DMRG, and time-evolution methods. The notes also briefly discuss projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) as a higher-dimensional generalization of MPS, together with the basic ideas behind approximate PEPS contraction. Finally, tensor-network representations of mixed states, quantum channels, and Lindblad dynamics are presented, with applications to thermal states and open quantum systems. The presentation is accompanied by short Julia code examples based on ITensor, ITensorMPS, and TensorMixedStates. These notes were written for the 9th Les Houches Summer School on Computational Physics: Open Quantum Systems, held in June 2026.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeryTrace: Verifying Reasoning Traces through Compilable Formalism and Structured Verification

arXiv:2606.24124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step reasoning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting remains fragile: logical errors or hallucinations in early steps silently propagate, producing confident but incorrect conclusions. This paper presents VeryTrace, a zero-shot verification-and-repair framework that formalizes natural-language reasoning traces into a structured, compilable representation. VeryTrace introduces a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that (i) makes step dependencies explicit, (ii) mechanizes quantitative content as executable expressions, and (iii) structures semantic inferences via deduction schemas. Our hybrid verifier combines deterministic checks for computational correctness, dependency resolution, and constraint satisfaction with targeted LLM audits for non-mechanizable semantic judgments, enabling step-level error localization and repair. Across three diverse domains-competition mathematics (AIME 2025), robotics planning (LLM-BabyBench), and kinship reasoning (CLUTRR), VeryTrace improves accuracy over zero-shot baselines on state-of-the-art LLMs without requiring domain-specific training or in-context examples, demonstrating that formalized trace verification achieves both precision and generalization.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

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

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509.10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments. However, these methods often require extensive training interactions, limiting their sample efficiency and practical applicability. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Conservative Discrete Quantile Actor-Critic (CDQAC), an offline RL algorithm that learns effective scheduling policies directly from static, suboptimal datasets. CDQAC couples a quantile-based critic with delayed policy updates to estimate the return distribution of machine-operation pairs. Extensive experiments on JSP and FJSP benchmarks demonstrate that CDQAC consistently outperforms the data-generating heuristics, surpasses state-of-the-art offline and online RL baselines, and is highly sample efficient, requiring only 1 to 5% of the original dataset to learn high-quality policies. Our analysis suggests that, in scheduling, offline RL performance is governed mainly by state-action coverage rather than the quality of individual trajectories. Scheduling couples a dense reward aligned with the makespan objective with equal-length trajectories across heuristics, enabling effective learning from a broad range of behaviors. Consistent with this observation, datasets generated by a simple random heuristic with broader coverage let it outperform policies trained on datasets produced by stronger heuristics such as Genetic Algorithms.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sub-Poisson distributions: Concentration inequalities, optimal variance proxies, and closure properties

arXiv:2508.12103v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a nonasymptotic framework for sub-Poisson distributions with moment generating function dominated by that of a Poisson distribution. At its core is a new notion of optimal sub-Poisson variance proxy, analogous to the variance parameter in the sub-Gaussian setting. This framework allows us to derive a Bennett-type concentration inequality without boundedness assumptions and to show that the sub-Poisson property is closed under key operations including independent sums and convex combinations, but not under all linear operations such as scalar multiplication. We derive bounds relating the sub-Poisson variance proxy to sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential Orlicz norms. Taken together, these results unify the treatment of Bernoulli and Poisson random variables and their signed versions in their natural tail regime.