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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EyeTheia: A Lightweight and Accessible Eye-Tracking Toolbox

We introduce EyeTheia, a lightweight and open deep learning pipeline for webcam-based gaze estimation, designed for browser-based experimental platforms and real-world cognitive and clinical research. EyeTheia enables real-time gaze tracking using only a standard laptop webcam, combining MediaPipe-based landmark extraction with a convolutional neural network inspired by iTracker and optional user-specific fine-tuning. We investigate two complementary strategies: adapting a model pretrained on mobile data and training the same architecture from scratch on a desktop-oriented dataset. Validation results on MPIIFaceGaze show comparable performance between both approaches prior to calibration, while lightweight user-specific fine-tuning consistently reduces gaze prediction error. We further evaluate EyeTheia in a realistic Dot-Probe task and compare it to the commercial webcam-based tracker SeeSo SDK. Results indicate strong agreement in left-right gaze allocation during stimulus presentation, despite higher temporal variability. Overall, EyeTheia provides a transparent and extensible solution for low-cost gaze tracking, suitable for scalable and reproducible experimental and clinical studies. The code, trained models, and experimental materials are publicly available.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

WAND: Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Autoregressive Text-to-Speech Models

Recent decoder-only autoregressive text-to-speech (AR-TTS) models produce high-fidelity speech, but their memory and compute costs scale quadratically with sequence length due to full self-attention. In this paper, we propose WAND, Windowed Attention and Knowledge Distillation, a framework that adapts pretrained AR-TTS models to operate with constant computational and memory complexity. WAND separates the attention mechanism into two: persistent global attention over conditioning tokens and local sliding-window attention over generated tokens. To stabilize fine-tuning, we employ a curriculum learning strategy that progressively tightens the attention window. We further utilize knowledge distillation from a full-attention teacher to recover high-fidelity synthesis quality with high data efficiency. Evaluated on three modern AR-TTS models, WAND preserves the original quality while achieving up to 66.2% KV cache memory reduction and length-invariant, near-constant per-step latency.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

First-order and interior-point methods for entanglement detection

arXiv:2508.05854v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum entanglement lies at the heart of quantum information science, yet its reliable detection in high-dimensional or noisy systems remains a fundamental computational challenge. Semidefinite programming (SDP) hierarchies, such as the Doherty-Parrilo-Spedalieri (DPS) and Extension (EXT) hierarchies, offer complete methods for entanglement detection, but it is well known that their practical use is limited by exponential growth in problem size if implemented naively. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a new SDP hierarchy, PST, that is sandwiched between EXT and DP – offering a tighter approximation to the set of separable states than EXT, while incurring significantly lower computational overhead than DPS. Second, we explicitly construct compact, polynomially-scalable descriptions of EXT and PST using partition mappings and operators. These descriptions in turn yield formulations that satisfy desirable properties such as the Slater condition and are well-suited to both first-order methods (FOMs) and interior-point methods (IPMs). Third, we design a suite of entanglement detection algorithms: three FOMs (Frank-Wolfe, projected gradient, and fast projected gradient) based on a least-squares formulation, and a custom primal-dual IPM based on a conic programming formulation. These methods are numerically stable and capable of producing entanglement witnesses or proximity measures, even in cases where states lie near the boundary of separability. Numerical experiments on benchmark quantum states demonstrate that our algorithms improve the ability to solve deeper levels of the SDP hierarchy.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference

Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

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

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

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

EmotionAI: A Privacy-Preserving Computational Intelligence Pipeline for Speech-Emotion-Grounded Conversational Analysis

arXiv:2606.24941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reviewing recorded interviews for affective cues such as composure, hesitation and agitation is slow and subjective, and cloud services that could automate it require sensitive audio to leave the device. EmotionAI is a fully local Computational Intelligence (CI) pipeline that couples Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) with generative reasoning. Speaker diarisation, Whisper Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and a wav2vec2 emotion classifier produce per-segment affective evidence, which is then passed to an adversarial three-model local Large Language Model (LLM) panel for timestamp-grounded and citation-constrained question answering. Zero-shot evaluation on the RAVDESS four-class English subset (n = 672) exposes cross-corpus fragility rather than classifier superiority: the deployed classifier scores 48.8% accuracy, above random (24.9%) and majority (28.6%) baselines but below an in-domain MFCC + logistic-regression comparator (71.0%). The complete pipeline runs in a mean 157 s on CPU (real-time factor approximately 1.33) with zero external calls. The contribution is not state-of-the-art SER but an auditable, privacy-preserving integration of imperfect affective evidence into grounded conversational analysis, together with an honest empirical account of where cross-corpus transfer and human-centred validation still fall short.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

Development of Deep-Learning Models that Predict Quantitative Protein-Ligand Interac-tions in Glycobiology as a part of a Capstone Course

Glycans coat the surface of all cells, and every glycan is recognised by specific glycan-binding pro-teins (GBPs). There are no general tools that can accurately estimate the binding strength between glycan and GBP from the amino acid sequence of the GBP and the molecular structure of the glycan, represented as SMILES string. We describe models for predicting such binding strengths developed as a part of a Capstone Course at the University of Alberta. The models are trained on a dataset that combines BindingDB, a published database of small-molecule protein interactions, and data from glycan arrays measured by Consortium of Functional Glycomics (CFG). In this hybrid dataset of protein-ligand interactions the ligands are both glycans from CFG and small molecules from BindingDB; similarly, proteins include GBP and proteins from BindingDB. Three models are presented (i) ProMax which fuses ESM-2, MolFormer, and MolCLR features; (ii) APEX which constrains learning to a predetermined form, a physical model of binding; (iii) UltraMax adds inter-atomic distances for the ligands. To address the dataset's severe long-tail distribution, the models employ tail-aware losses for rare high-binding instances. Trained and evaluated on approximately one million protein–ligand pairs using hold-out splits for unseen molecules, the three models provide a unified framework for quantitative glycan-protein binding prediction. We observed that learning glycan-protein binding is harder than the similar task of learning small-molecule-protein interactions. Simple mirror-inversion tests led us to postulate that insufficient use of chiral features is an important source of difficulty in learning these interactions.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Mind-Studio: Executable World Models with Lookahead Evaluation for Partially Observable Games

arXiv:2606.16070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-model synthesis aims to turn interaction experience into an internal model of environment dynamics. Existing symbolic approaches often fit observed transitions or mixtures of local rules, but they do not produce a complete executable program that can run independently of the real environment. We present Mind-Studio, a framework that synthesizes executable pygame-style world models from state-action-next-state trajectories using large language models. Mind-Studio combines entropy-selected traces with a lightweight game skill file containing object, action, and static scene information extracted from screenshots. We evaluate synthesis quality with a K-step lookahead fidelity protocol that compares generated world-model rollouts against Real-ALE rollouts from the same state. On Montezuma's Revenge, Mind-Studio improves chosen-action next-state prediction from 0.3% for PoE-World to 48.7% while verifying 5 of 8 subgoals; across Alien, Assault, and Skiing, it achieves stronger branch-level fidelity than prior learned lookahead sources.

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

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

arXiv:2606.12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.

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

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years. Existing approaches typically rely on explicit chain-of-thought or continuous latent-space trajectories to enhance multi-step reasoning. However, these methods generally assume that an input admits a single latent interpretation and unfold reasoning along a fixed path or under a uniform computation budget. In real-world multimodal settings, visual observations are often subject to occlusion, blur, viewpoint variation, or semantic ambiguity, giving rise to multiple plausible interpretations. A uniform reasoning strategy not only limits the model's ability to explore multiple hypotheses but also incurs high memory usage and rollout cost. We present DLWM (Diverse Latent World Models), a multimodal reasoning framework that combines latent-space reasoning with reinforcement learning. First, we construct a set of diverse latent world hypotheses in continuous latent space, each capturing a different plausible interpretation of the visual input, and unfold latent reasoning independently on each hypothesis. An orthogonality-based diversity regularizer explicitly prevents hypothesis collapse. Second, we formulate the latent reasoning process as a resource-constrained sequential decision problem and introduce a resource-aware reinforcement learning policy that adaptively allocates computation across hypotheses, dynamically deciding whether to expand, terminate, or merge reasoning paths, thereby substantially reducing memory footprint and improving rollout efficiency. Experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM outperforms existing methods by 2-5 points in accuracy while reducing memory usage by 24%.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.

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

A Turbo-Inference Strategy for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Object detection and instance segmentation tasks are closely related. Existing top-down instance segmentation methods usually follow a detect-then-segment paradigm, where an initial detector is used to recognize and localize objects with bounding boxes, followed by the segmentation of an instance mask within each bounding box. In such methods, the detection accuracy directly influences the subsequent segmentation performance. However, previous research has seldom explored the impact of the instance segmentation task on object detection. In this paper, we present a turbo-inference strategy for the top-down methods that leverages the complementary information between detection and segmentation tasks iteratively. Specifically we design two modules: turbo-detection head and turbo-segmentation head, which facilitate communication between the tasks. The two modules form a closed loop that interlaces the detection and segmentation results without retraining the model. Comprehensive experiments on the COCO, iFLYTEK, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that our method substantially enhances both detection and segmentation accuracies with a certain increase in computational cost. The proposed method represents a tradeoff between prediction accuracy and inference speed. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhaozhen2333/Turbo-Learning.git.

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

Integrating Reasoning and Generalization in Text-to-SQL via Self-Enhanced Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.15598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this task, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle to strike a balance between strong reasoning capabilities and robust generalization. To address these limitations, we propose CoTE-SQL to enhance the LLM-based text-to-SQL generation with three key innovations: (i) self-enhanced reasoning traces distilled from LLMs without human annotation, (ii) structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with modular decomposition and examples retrieval, and (iii) error-aware revision based on SQL execution feedback. Extensive experiments on the Spider and Bird benchmarks demonstrate that CoTE-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance among methods built on open-source LLMs with comparable model sizes on Bird (53.39% EX / 59.02 VES) and strong results on Spider (79.60% EX / 77.19 VES), with especially significant gains on complex queries. Results highlight the effectiveness of combining self-enhancement, structured reasoning, and execution-time feedback within an LLM-based framework for text-to-SQL design.

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

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606.25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors. An emerging alternative for discrete user representation – using LLMs to generate text-based user tokens – captures topical co-occurrences rather than deep sequential behavior dynamics and produces outputs that are difficult to ground to item attributes. Meanwhile, Semantic ID (SID) based item tokenization has proven effective for improving generalization in generative recommendation, yet discrete SID-based representations for users remain largely unexplored. We propose TokenMinds, an industrial-scale system that extends the PLUM framework from item retrieval to user modeling, generating both discrete SID-based user tokens and dense user embeddings via an encoder-decoder architecture adapted from pre-trained LLMs. This dual-output design provides the complementary benefits of discrete, semantically grounded user representations while maintaining compatibility with existing downstream models that rely on dense embeddings. Additionally, the shared SID vocabulary naturally extends to cross-scenario modeling: by unifying long-form and short-form video behaviors into a single model, we substantially reduce training and serving costs. We validate TokenMinds through extensive offline experiments and live launches on multiple YouTube surfaces, served on full user traffic (billions of users) via an asynchronous infrastructure that decouples representation generation from downstream scoring. Focusing on ranking as the primary downstream use case, our results confirm the practical viability of SID-based user tokens at industrial scale and demonstrate that tokens and dense embeddings provide complementary value across different production ranking systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Erasure cost of a quantum process: A thermodynamic meaning of the dynamical min-entropy

arXiv:2506.05307v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The erasure of information is fundamentally an irreversible logical operation, carrying profound consequences for the energetics of computation and information processing. We investigate the thermodynamic costs associated with erasing (and preparing) quantum processes. Specifically, we analyze an arbitrary bipartite unitary gate acting on logical and ancillary input-output systems, where the ancillary input is always initialized in the ground state. We focus on the adversarial erasure cost of the reduced dynamics - that is, the minimal thermodynamic work cost to erase the logical output of the gate for any logical input, assuming full access to the ancilla but no access to any purifying reference of the logical input state. We determine that this adversarial erasure cost is directly proportional to the negative min-entropy of the reduced dynamics, thereby giving the dynamical min-entropy a clear operational meaning. The dynamical min-entropy can take positive and negative values, depending on the underlying quantum dynamics. The negative value of the erasure cost implies that the extraction of thermodynamic work is possible instead of its consumption during the process. A key foundation of this result is the quantum process decoupling theorem, which quantitatively relates the decoupling ability of a process with its min-entropy. This insight bridges thermodynamics, information theory, and the fundamental limits of quantum computation.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AI Contagion in Social Networks

arXiv:2606.15206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while receiving AI-generated content, and AI systems retrain on the aggregate social information they influence. This interaction generates two feedback forces: an AI contagion channel, through which distortions diffuse across the network, and an AI social distortion multiplier, through which retraining amplifies past errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the environment, we show that the long-run behavior of the system admits a two-dimensional representation whose spectral radius determines whether AI-mediated information systems are dynamically stable or unstable. We characterize a sharp regulatory frontier identifying the minimum filtering required for stability and show how network topology shapes systemic informational risk.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Decentralized Coordination of Autonomous Traffic Through Advanced Air Mobility Corridors

arXiv:2606.23832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The use of dedicated corridors for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) traffic is one of the most commonly proposed pathways to integrating them into existing airspace operations. Most prior research has focused on the design of networks of AAM corridors and conflict resolution for aircraft within corridors. It is also generally believed that while attractive from an implementation perspective, corridor-based operations may be inefficient, especially in the absence of centralized traffic management. In this paper, we show that contrary to this belief, it is possible for autonomous aircraft to learn to self-organize into corridor flows in decentralized settings. We illustrate our approach using scenarios in which fixed-wing aircraft need to safely and efficiently traverse (1) a single corridor with metering after the exit, (2) a sequence of two consecutive corridors, and (3) a corridor that splits into two. We find that in decentralized settings with only local information, the aircraft are able to conform to the corridor boundaries more than 94% of the time and reach their goal in a relatively efficient manner. Furthermore, tactical interventions to handle violations of the separation minimum are needed only infrequently in low- and medium-density settings. However, such tactical interventions become more frequently necessary only when traffic density is high.