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

Phase controlled spectral topology, dynamic stability and sensitivity in Non-Hermitian Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.16522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We theoretically investigate a non-Hermitian cavity-magnon platform in which coherent photonmagnon interactions and reservoir-mediated dissipative coupling interfere through a single externally tunable phase. We show that this interference phase provides a universal control parameter that continuously rotates the effective coupling between Hermitian and anti-Hermitian regimes, enabling dynamic transitions between level repulsion and level attraction without modifying intrinsic system parameters. The resulting phase-controlled non-Hermitian topology gives rise to exceptional points, linewidth engineering, and zero-damping conditions. Owing to the propagation-direction dependence of the dissipative interaction, the system further exhibits strong nonreciprocal transport and phase-tunable isolation arising from asymmetric hybridization of the cavity and magnon modes. Beyond its spectral and transport properties, we establish a direct connection between nonHermitian spectral topology and nonequilibrium population dynamics. The interference phase governs the stability of the hybrid modes, driving transitions between stable relaxation, critical slowing down near exceptional points, oscillatory energy exchange, and exponentially amplified dynamics. We further demonstrate that the same phase-controlled exceptional topology can be exploited for enhanced sensing, where the eigenvalue response exhibits the characteristic square-root scaling associated with exceptional-point physics. Our results provide a unified framework linking spectral topology, directional transport, dynamical stability, and sensing functionality through reservoirengineered interference in cavity magnonic systems.

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

Block-wise Codeword Embedding for Reliable Multi-bit Text Watermarking

Recent multi-bit watermarking methods for large language models (LLMs) prioritize capacity over reliability, often conflating decoding with detection. Our analysis reveals that existing ECC-based extractors suffer from catastrophic false positive rates (FPR), and applying rejection thresholds merely collapses detection sensitivity (TPR) to random guessing. To resolve this structural limitation, we propose BREW (Block-wise Reliable Embedding for Watermarking), a framework shifting the paradigm to designated verification. BREW employs a two-stage mechanism: (i) blind message estimation via independent block voting, followed by (ii) window-shifting verification that rigorously validates the payload against local edits. Experiments demonstrate that BREW achieves a TPR of 0.965 with an FPR of 0.02 under 10% synonym substitution, demonstrating that the high-FPR issue is not an inherent trade-off of multi-bit watermarking, but a solvable structural flaw of prior decoding-centric designs. Our framework is model-agnostic and theoretically grounded, providing a scalable solution for reliable forensic deployment.

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

OpenThoughts-Agent: Data Recipes for Agentic Models

arXiv:2606.24855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents. Existing open efforts such as SWE-Smith, SERA, and Nemotron-Terminal typically target a single benchmark, leaving open the question of how to train models that generalize across diverse agentic tasks. The OpenThoughts-Agent (OT-Agent) project addresses this gap with a fully open data curation pipeline for training agentic models. We conduct more than 100 controlled ablation experiments to systematically investigate each stage of the pipeline, yielding insights on the importance of task sources and diversity. We then assemble a training set of 100K examples from our pipeline and fine-tune Qwen3-32B on this dataset, which yields an average accuracy of 44.8% across seven agentic benchmarks and a 3.9 percentage point improvement over the strongest existing open data agentic model (Nemotron-Terminal-32B, 40.9%). Moreover, our training data exhibits strong scaling properties, outperforming alternative open datasets at every training set size in compute-controlled comparisons. We publicly release our training sets, data pipeline, experimental data, and models at openthoughts.ai to support future open research on agentic model training.

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

TSA: Temporal Slot Activation for Persistent Object-Centric Video Representation

Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into temporally persistent entity representations. Existing recurrent video slot-attention methods propagate a fixed set of slots across frames, but typically assume unconditional slot propagation: every slot is updated and decoded at every frame, regardless of whether its corresponding object is visible. We show that this design violates a basic lifecycle requirement for persistent slots: when an object is absent or fully occluded, its slot should preserve its previous state and avoid explaining unrelated visible content. Instead, unconditional propagation creates two failure pathways: update-induced state drift, where current-frame evidence overwrites the absent object's representation, and decoder-induced reconstruction interference, where the inactive slot remains coupled to reconstruction through decoder attention. We propose Temporal Slot Activation (TSA), a mechanism that learns a per-slot, per-frame activation score $\alpha_{k,t} \in (0, 1)$ without visibility supervision. TSA uses this activation as a shared latent control variable for slot lifecycle modeling. When a slot is inactive, TSA anchors its state to the previous slot via activation-gated updating and suppresses its decoder participation through an activation-dependent additive bias on attention logits before softmax normalization. This jointly reduces state drift and reconstruction-driven interference. To improve decisions under partial occlusion and gradual reappearance, TSA further conditions activation prediction on a per-slot temporal memory produced by a Temporal Context Encoder. We evaluate TSA on MOVi-C/E, YT-VIS, and OVIS benchmarks using both standard and tracking-based metrics (FG-ARI, mBO, IDF1, HOTA). TSA consistently improves object decomposition and temporal identity preservation, with large gains on long, heavily occluded videos.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

ASAP: Agent-System Co-Design for Wall-Clock-Centered Auto HPO Research for ML Experiments

Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) is essential for maximizing machine learning model performance, and its core challenge is sample efficiency: finding strong configurations within a limited budget. Because every HPO tool relies on a surrogate prior that imparts its own inductive bias, individual tools struggle once problems become sufficiently diverse and drift from these priors. Motivated by the reasoning and generalization capabilities of LLMs, recent work has explored using LLMs for HPO and reports improved per-iteration performance. Yet these methods share two limitations with a common origin: they use the LLM as a single-tool replacement evaluated by iteration count. (i) Deployed in place of prior tools, the LLM is itself constrained by its pretraining objective to one family of inductive-biased proposals; this single-source setup still fails to handle the full diversity of problems. (ii) Per-iteration evaluation ignores that, in real runs, LLM inference or tool execution is paid serially on top of model evaluation every round, so iteration-count gains do not translate into end-to-end wall-clock gains. We present ASAP, an agent-system co-design that addresses both limitations. On the agent side, ASAP uses the LLM to integrate a diverse pool of inductive-biased optimizers and to select among their proposals each round. On the system side, ASAP re-architects the loop to reduce end-to-end wall-clock while preserving regret quality: a prefix-stable prompt maximizes KV-cache reuse across rounds; speculation parallelism hides the remaining LLM and tool latency under model evaluation via a relative-error accept test; and a Self-Tuner adapts the speculation threshold from execution logs off the critical path. Extensive experiments on diverse modern HPO tasks show that ASAP consistently outperforms baselines, underscoring the value of tool integration and agent-system co-design.

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

Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

QCI Connect: A Modular Full-Stack Quantum Computing Platform

arXiv:2606.14456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a world of various competing quantum computing architectures, hardware-agnostic, full-stack platforms are necessary to bring the full power of quantum computing hardware to domain experts via the cloud. QCI Connect and its Software Development Kit provide a reference architecture for a full-stack platform with a modular design and open-source interface definitions, built to facilitate a community-driven application ecosystem. Here, we present its overall design and features, central interfaces, and lessons learned, both for users of the platform and as a reference guide for future developments.

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

Competition and Diversity in Generative AI

arXiv:2412.08610v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent evidence, both in the lab and in the wild, suggests that the use of generative artificial intelligence reduces the diversity of content produced. The use of the same or similar AI models appears to lead to more homogeneous behavior. Our work begins with the observation that there is a force pushing in the opposite direction: competition. When producers compete with one another (e.g., for customers or attention), they are incentivized to create novel or unique content. We explore the impact competition has on both content diversity and overall social welfare. Through a formal game-theoretic model, we show that competitive markets select for diverse AI models, mitigating monoculture. We further show that a generative AI model that performs well in isolation (i.e., according to a benchmark) may fail to provide value in a competitive market. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating generative AI models across the breadth of their output distributions, particularly when they will be deployed in competitive environments. We validate our results empirically by using language models to play Scattergories, a word game in which players are rewarded for answers that are both correct and unique. Overall, our results suggest that homogenization due to generative AI is unlikely to persist in competitive markets, and instead, competition in downstream markets may drive diversification in AI model development.

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

Invariant Graph Representations for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs Under Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2405.19062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) enable fine-grained modeling of evolving relational systems. However, most existing CTDG representation learning methods are tailored to in-distribution settings and exhibit limited robustness under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Although recent causal approaches learn invariant representations via interventions, they are primarily designed for static or discrete-time graphs and become computationally prohibitive for CTDGs due to the combinatorial explosion of structural and temporal variations. To address these challenges, we propose CIR, a framework grounded in a novel structural causal model termed the ICCM. To avoid exhaustive interventions, we leverage the Normalized Weighted Geometric Mean (NWGM) to efficiently approximate interventional predictions. We further instantiate ICCM within a practical deep learning architecture that jointly captures invariant structural and temporal patterns through dedicated subgraph extractors, and maintains an environment memory bank to model distributional shifts across evolving contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIR consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse OOD scenarios.

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

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

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

LOCUS: Local Visual Cue Search for Enhancing Fine-Grained Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on fine-grained visual perception, even when high-resolution inputs preserve the necessary local details. We identify this limitation as visual context rot: decisive evidence may exist in the full image, yet fail to be reliably selected and used amid redundant visual context. We propose LOCUS (LOcal visual CUe Search), a training framework that teaches MLLMs to internalize local evidence search through a verifiable proxy task. During training, LOCUS provides a local crop as a visual cue and optimizes the model to recover its spatial support in the full image using an IoU-based reward. The visual cue is used only during training, leaving the standard image-question inference interface unchanged. Experiments across fine-grained perception, hallucination, general understanding, and reasoning benchmarks show that LOCUS improves localization-sensitive visual understanding while preserving broad capabilities. Attention analyses further indicate stronger focus on task-relevant evidence regions, suggesting that training-time visual cue search provides an effective route to internalized fine-grained evidence selection.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

On the Poisson Follower Model

arXiv:2309.04864v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a stochastic geometry dynamics inspired by opinion dynamics that captures the essence of modern asymmetric social networks with leaders and followers. Points in the Euclidean space represent opinions, and the leader of an agent is the one with the closest opinion. In this dynamics, each follower updates its opinion by halving the distance to its leader. We demonstrate that this simple dynamics and its iterations exhibit several interesting purely geometric phenomena related to the evolution of leadership and opinion clusters, which resemble those observed in social networks. We also show that when the initial opinions are randomly distributed as a stationary Poisson point process, the spatial frequency of each of these phenomena can be expressed through an integral geometry formula involving semi-algebraic domains. Finally, we analyze numerically the limiting behavior of this follower dynamics. In the Poisson case, the agents fall into two categories: ultimate followers, who continue updating their opinions indefinitely, and ultimate leaders, who adopt a fixed opinion after a finite time. Spatial discrete event simulations support all our findings.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

WormSORT: A detection-based multiple object tracking model for individual silkworms in breeding environments

作者:

by Hongkang Shi, Linbo Li, Shiping Zhu, Haibo He, Minghui Zhu, Jianfei Zhang Variety breeding has long been a cornerstone of high-quality agriculture, and recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened new avenues for accelerating biological breeding. In this study, we applied multiple object tracking (MOT) technology to silkworm breeding to achieve efficient, non-invasive, and dynamic individual monitoring. Unlike pedestrian or vehicle tracking, silkworms pose unique challenges for MOT due to their small size, dense distribution, and high inter-individual similarity, which complicate accurate tracking and behavioral analysis. To address these issues, we propose WormSORT, an enhanced tracking method based on a tracking-by-detection framework with an optimized data association strategy. A pre-trained detection model identifies silkworms in each frame, and deep feature vectors are extracted using a re-identification network. Identity association is first performed using Intersection over Union (IoU) matching, followed by deep feature similarity for unmatched cases, improving both tracking accuracy and reliability. To further enhance tracking stability, we introduce a candidate input padding mechanism, including IoU padding and feature padding, ensuring that high-confidence unmatched trajectories and detections remain involved in the matching process. To validate the proposed tracking strategy, we constructed two multiple silkworm tracking (MST) datasets: MST-50, containing approximately 50 individuals over 1000 frames, and MST-100, containing approximately 100 individuals over 1200 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that WormSORT outperforms existing methods, including DeepSORT, StrongSORT, OCSORT, ByteTrack, and BotSORT, achieving superior tracking performance. This study provides a valuable reference for silkworm tracking and behavioral analysis, contributing to the advancement of high-quality silkworm rearing and management.

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

Distill on a Diet: Efficient Knowledge Distillation via Learnable Data Pruning

arXiv:2606.25488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is widely used to obtain compact models for efficient inference in resource-constrained environments. Yet the computational overhead of the distillation process itself is often overlooked, raising the question of whether a better student model can be obtained with less data and less compute via data pruning. However, existing data pruning methods are not designed for KD: some introduce substantial overhead, such as obtaining training dynamics through retraining, while others rely on heuristic selection rules that fail to capture what KD actually requires, often resulting in suboptimal subsets. To address these issues, we propose IF-Beta, an efficient data pruning framework that combines influence functions with a learnable sampling policy. Empirically, we first demonstrate that influence functions can serve as an effective and efficient estimator of sample impact in KD settings, where only a pretrained teacher is available. Building on this, our sampling policy is specifically parameterized by a Beta distribution, whose highly flexible two-parameter family allows the policy to adapt to diverse pruning regimes rather than being tied to fixed heuristic forms. Next, we formulate KD pruning as optimizing this policy through a bilevel objective, where the inner loop operates in the teacher feature space with a KD-aligned objective, enabling fast proxy training, while the outer loop updates the policy parameters to maximize distillation performance. This design ensures that IF-Beta is both computationally efficient and inherently aligned with the goals of KD. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet show that IF-Beta consistently outperforms other baselines across a wide range of pruning ratios. Remarkably, IF-Beta enables students trained on less data and less compute to surpass the performance of students distilled on the full dataset.

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

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

InVitroGap: an open-source tool for automated quantification of wound closure in the in vitro scratch assay

Abstract Background and Objective: Scratch assays are widely used to study wound closure in vitro, but quantitative image analysis remains constrained by manual variability, proprietary workflows, and tools requiring programming expertise. We developed InVitroGap, a Python-based application with a browser-accessible interface for automated quantification of scratch assay closure from sequential microscopy images. Methods: RCC-ER and Renca cells were seeded in 96-well ImageLock plates and scratched using a WoundMaker device for uniform linear wounds or a 200 uL pipette tip for crisscross wounds. Phase-contrast time-lapse images acquired at 0, 24, and 48 h with an IncuCyte SX5 system were independently analyzed using IncuCyte 2023A Rev2 and InVitroGap. The InVitroGap pipeline combines Gaussian smoothing, gradient-based texture mapping, adaptive percentile thresholding, and morphological post-processing to quantify wound confluence and relative wound density (RWD). Agreement was evaluated using paired comparisons, Pearson and Spearman correlations, Bland-Altman analysis, and mean absolute error (MAE). Results: InVitroGap measurements closely tracked IncuCyte outputs across both cell lines, with no significant between-method differences (p > 0.05), strong pooled correlations (R square = 0.964 for RWD; R square = 0.983 for wound confluence), and small mean biases (absolute bias [≤] 1.64%). The tool successfully processed crisscross wounds from brightfield image series, and a complete four-timepoint series was analyzed in approximately 10 seconds, with robust performance across distinct cell morphologies and wound geometries. Conclusions: InVitroGap provides a transparent, computationally efficient, and platform-independent alternative for scratch assay analysis, delivering performance comparable to commercial systems while remaining freely accessible at https://invitrogap.vercel.app/.

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

Regular Fourier Features for Nonstationary Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2602.23006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulating a Gaussian process requires sampling from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution, which scales cubically with the number of sample locations. Spectral methods address this challenge by exploiting the Fourier representation and treating the spectral density as a probability distribution suitable for Monte Carlo approximation. Although this probabilistic interpretation is valid for stationary processes, it is overly restrictive for the nonstationary case, where spectral densities are generally not probability measures. We propose regular Fourier features for harmonizable processes to avoid this limitation. Our method discretizes the spectral representation directly, preserving the correlation structure among spectral weights without requiring probability assumptions. Under a finite-spectral-support assumption, this yields an efficient low-rank approximation that is consistent and positive semi-definite by construction. When the spectral density is unknown, the framework extends naturally to kernel learning from data. We demonstrate the method on locally stationary and harmonizable mixture kernels, the latter with a complex-valued spectral density, and apply the kernel-learning extension to real and synthetic data.

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

EnvShip-Bench: An Environment-Enhanced Benchmark for Short-Term Vessel Trajectory Prediction

arXiv:2606.15240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction is important for intelligent shipping, maritime surveillance, and navigation safety. However, existing public maritime AIS resources are often limited by inconsistent forecasting protocols, uneven data quality, and the lack of benchmark-ready contextual annotations, which hinder fair comparison and context-aware modeling. To address this gap, we present EnvShip-Bench, a unified benchmark for short-term vessel trajectory prediction built from large-scale raw AIS data from the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) and NOAA through a common processing pipeline. EnvShip-Bench adopts a standardized forecasting protocol with 10 minutes of observation, 10 minutes of prediction, and 20-second sampling in vessel-centric local metric coordinates. Beyond the large-scale core benchmark, it provides a quality-first compact subset for efficient and reproducible experimentation, together with synchronized environmental and nearby-vessel context extensions. As a result, EnvShip-Bench supports trajectory-only, environment-aware, and interaction-aware forecasting under a unified evaluation framework. Extensive benchmark statistics and analysis demonstrate that EnvShip-Bench offers a standardized, extensible, and context-aware foundation for maritime trajectory forecasting research.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

PO-PDDL: Learning Symbolic POMDPs from Visual Demonstrations for Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.15654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world robot task planning must operate under both stochastic action execution and partial observability, yet constructing Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) models for real robotics domains remains difficult and labor-intensive. We introduce PO-PDDL, a symbolic formulation of POMDPs that preserves the relational structure and LLM-friendly syntax of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), while explicitly modeling partial observability, stochasticity, and beliefs. Building on this formulation, we propose a demonstration-driven pipeline for learning PO-PDDL models. The proposed method reconstructs latent symbolic state trajectories from real-robot execution videos, identifies partial observability via inconsistencies between inferred states and visual observations, and learns stochastic transition and observation models accordingly. The resulting PO-PDDL domains are reusable across tasks and enable online belief-space planning under both perception and execution uncertainty. Experiments on real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks show that our method consistently outperforms existing PDDL and POMDP model-learning approaches, achieving robust task planning under uncertainty with significantly lower planning cost.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.

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

ASSCG: Just-Right Gating over Chattering for Fast-Slow LLM Planning in Autonomous Driving

Large language models (LLMs) can improve autonomous driving planning but are costly to query online, and existing fast-slow planners often rely on hand-designed triggering rules that either over-call the slow system or call it at the wrong times. We formulate slow-system invocation as a resource-aware sequential decision problem and propose the Adaptive Slow-System Control Gate (ASSCG), which makes frame-level Query/Cache/Drop decisions to refresh, reuse, or suppress slow guidance. ASSCG uses an RWKV backbone for efficient long-horizon gating and is trained with supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO-style compute-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. We apply ASSCG to two different fast-slow architectures: (i) AsyncDriver on nuPlan Hard20 closed-loop evaluation, where ASSCG improves score to 67.28 (+2.28) while reducing average end-to-end inference latency by 60%; and (ii) a RecogDrive-based dual system that we build by replacing its original VLM-2B module with a lightweight ViT-based fast planner and adding an LLM slow planner, evaluated on NAVSIM, where ASSCG achieves 91.4 PDMS (+0.6) and increases average speed by 25%. The project page, including video visualizations and additional results, is available at https://williamxuanyu.github.io/asscg/.