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

Exact Markovian Dissipation Requires Singular Energy Resources

arXiv:2606.19510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Gorini–Kossakowski–Lindblad–Sudarshan (GKLS) equation describes irreversible quantum dynamical semigroups. We show that this description cannot be exact under physically regular energy conditions. We prove that the open-system survival probability under physically regular energy conditions has sublinear decay, whereas any dissipative GKLS semigroup has a linear short-time decay. Hence exact Markovian dissipation requires singular energy resources: an unbounded-below total Hamiltonian or infinite initial energy, and a divergent interaction-energy moment. Therefore, a dissipative time-independent GKLS equation should be regarded as an effective description rather than the exact reduced dynamics of a Hamiltonian dilation satisfying physically regular energy conditions.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Three non-Hermitian random matrix universality classes of complex edge statistics: Spacing ratios and distributions

arXiv:2603.28457v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The conjectured three generic local bulk statistics amongst all non-Hermitian random matrix symmetry classes have recently been extended to three generic local edge statistics. We study analytically and numerically complex spacing ratios and nearest-neighbour (NN) spacing distributions that characterise such local statistics. We choose the three simplest representatives of these universality classes, given by the Gaussian ensembles of complex Ginibre, complex symmetric and complex self-dual matrices, denoted by class A, AI$^\dag$ and AII$^\dag$. In the first part, we analytically study the complex spacing ratio in class A, at finite matrix size $N$. Introducing a conditional point process, we simplify existing expressions and show why an uncontrolled approximation introduced earlier converges well in the large-$N$ limit in the bulk. When specifying to the elliptic Ginibre ensemble, we present a parameter-dependent $N=3$ surmise for the complex spacing ratio, interpolating to that of the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), where such a surmise is very accurate. In the second numerical part, we compare complex spacing ratios, its moments, and NN spacing distributions for all three ensembles with that of uncorrelated points, the two-dimensional (2D) Poisson process, both in the bulk and at the edge. The varying degree of repulsion within these different edge universality classes can be well understood in terms of an effective 2D Coulomb gas description, at different values of inverse temperature $\beta$. We find indications that the complex spacing ratio does not fully unfold the local statistics at the edge. Finally we verify that for small argument, in all three symmetry classes the NN spacing distributions in the bulk and at the edge are consistent with the universal cubic repulsion.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Explaining Attention with Program Synthesis

arXiv:2606.19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy

Text and 2D-conditioning interfaces provide weak, ambiguous control over spatial transformations in image editing – particularly under large object motions and camera changes. Prior work has used 3D primitives such as boxes, but only as loose conditioning signals indicating approximate object location rather than specifying the transformation. We instead use 3D boxes as structured specifications: the user provides the input and output boxes of the edit, casting editing as a well-posed geometry problem. This ``thinking in boxes'' interface, where each box face is color-coded to convey 3D orientation, gives precise control over translation, rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes in real images while preserving scene and object identity, and recovering previously unseen object regions. To ground transformations in scene appearance, we introduce a depth-aligned planar floor as a global reference frame, shaded with depth-aware cues. Conditioned on this structure, an image generator produces consistent results under large transformations. Trained in two stages – on synthetic multi-object scenes and a small set of real-world videos from Objectron – the system generalizes to complex, in-the-wild real images. Our method operates directly on real photographs and substantially outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on large 3D edits.

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

How Far Can Machine Translation Quality Take You? Extrinsic Discourse Evaluation in Goal-Oriented Setups

Existing machine translation (MT) metrics and discourse-focused evaluations primarily assess translation quality intrinsically, without measuring the downstream consequences of translation errors. In this work, we focus on extrinsic discourse evaluation of machine translation under two distinct regimes: static and interactive. Under the static regime, we propose an entity counting task as a probe of referential consistency in discourse. We show that high intrinsic MT quality does not reliably predict downstream discourse success and strong MT systems still produce referential inconsistencies. For the interactive regime, we study the goal-oriented multi-agent Welfare Diplomacy game as a probe of long-horizon communication and coordination. We find that interaction-specific translation failures impact downstream coordination. Our results highlight goal-oriented environments as a viable framework for discourse-sensitive extrinsic MT evaluation.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Projections for Multi-Copy Quantum Algorithms

arXiv:2606.20238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating nonlinear properties of quantum states is a central task in quantum information science. Multivariate traces, $\mathrm{tr}(\rho_1 \cdots \rho_K)$, and nonlinear observables such as $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$, for integer $K$, can be accessed through collective measurements on multiple state copies, but standard protocols based on swap tests require coherent operations on the full Hilbert space and become experimentally unfeasible for large systems. In this work, we introduce a framework for multi-copy measurements based on random projections onto lower-dimensional subspaces prior to the collective measurement, which is then performed only on the reduced Hilbert space. This procedure yields a tunable tradeoff between coherent quantum resources and statistical sampling overhead, allowing the amount of coherent processing to be matched to the capabilities of the underlying hardware. We derive explicit formulas relating the Haar-averaged projected moments to multivariate traces of the original states and analyze the sampling overhead induced by the projection procedure. Specifically, after compressing an $n$-qubit state to a reduced $q$-qubit subspace, estimating $\mathrm{tr}(\rho^K)$ requires approximately $O(2^{(n-q)(K-1)})$ copies of $\rho$, with each qubit projected out increasing the sampling cost by a factor of $2^{K-1}$. Our results establish how coherent multi-copy operations can be traded for additional state copies, enabling multi-copy quantum protocols to be optimized for the available hardware resources.

09.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Mapping and engineering the human cell–cell interactome

Efforts to systematically understand how cell interactions tune tissue-level function have motivated transformative advances in single-cell transcriptomics and spatial profiling. Although these technologies can measure molecular states in individual cells and their spatial mapping within tissues, they also reveal that there exists a fundamental knowledge gap of how cells influence each other in context. In this Perspective, we propose an initiative to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome: a functional atlas of how all major human cell types communicate. We highlight how recent innovations can make this vision achievable. As a first moonshot, we propose the ‘Billion Cell×Cell Project’, which systematically characterizes the outcomes of defined cell–cell dyads across diverse cell types and conditions. We envision this multistage initiative will produce progressively deeper insights and unlock additional avenues for therapeutic discovery. We call on the scientific community to join us in building the tools, datasets and models that will decode and rewrite the language of life between cells. Di Carlo and colleagues discuss technologies required to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome and the therapeutic avenues such an atlas could unlock.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DeceptionX: Explainable Deception Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models

Deception detection is a critical and highly challenging task within affective computing and behavioral analysis. Existing deep learning methods typically treat this task as a straightforward classification problem; however, this black-box approach lacks interpretability and fails to capture the complex logical deduction processes utilized by human experts when identifying lies. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown potential, applying them effectively requires a bridge between low-level audiovisual cues and high-level logical reasoning. In this paper, we propose DeceptionX, a novel MLLM framework that shifts the paradigm of deception detection from black-box classification to an interpretable Observe-Think-Summarize reasoning process. To address the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data, we first constructed DeceptChain, a high-quality dataset developed through a human-in-the-loop process. This dataset synthesizes fine-grained visual and auditory evidence (such as micro-expressions and vocal tremors) into structured chain-of-thought reasoning data. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage training pipeline and a Discrepancy-Aware Redundancy Elimination~(DARE) strategy for DeceptionX to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeceptionX not only outperforms existing MLLM baselines and state-of-the-art methods on standard real-world benchmarks but also provides transparent, expert-level reasoning paths, bridging the critical gap between accuracy and interpretability in multimodal deception detection.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Performance-Driven Environment Abstraction with Multi-Timescale Learning

arXiv:2606.17377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study performance-driven environment abstraction for decision-making in large Markov decision processes. Rather than preserving geometric or topological structure, we seek abstractions that directly optimize decision quality. We model abstraction as a controlled approximation obtained by aggregating the state space and enforcing a shared action distribution within each aggregated state. For a fixed partition, we establish a performance guarantee that separates value-function approximation error from the loss introduced by action sharing. Guided by this analysis, we develop a multi-timescale reinforcement learning framework that jointly adapts the policy and a tree-structured environment abstraction. The resulting algorithm refines and coarsens regions of the state space based on Q-value discrepancies, balancing performance against abstraction size and complexity. Empirical results demonstrate substantial state compression, improved sample efficiency, and faster replanning compared to actor-critic baselines.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

作者:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

RotRNN: Modelling Long Sequences with Rotations

arXiv:2407.07239v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear recurrent neural networks, such as State Space Models (SSMs) and Linear Recurrent Units (LRUs), have recently shown state-of-the-art performance on long sequence modelling benchmarks. Despite their success, their empirical performance is not well understood and they come with a number of drawbacks, most notably their complex initialisation and normalisation schemes. In this work, we address some of these issues by proposing RotRNN – a linear recurrent model which utilises the convenient properties of rotation matrices. We show that RotRNN provides a simple and efficient model with a robust normalisation procedure, and a practical implementation that remains faithful to its theoretical derivation. RotRNN also achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art linear recurrent models on several long sequence modelling datasets.

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

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

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

Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network for Crystalline Material Discovery

arXiv:2606.17852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The discovery of novel crystalline materials is a critical challenge in computational materials science, often limited by the spatial representation limitations and mode collapse typical of classical generative models. Traditionally, developing Quantum GANs for continuous 3D space is hindered by the limited capacity of near-term hardware. To overcome this, we adapt a physics-informed "split-head" architecture right from the quantum trunk to explicitly decouple macroscopic lattice bounds from microscopic atomic coordinates, significantly maximizing resource efficiency. This study disentangles the contributions of quantum circuits from these architectural priors by evaluating a Split-Head Quantum Generative Adversarial Network against an architecture-matched classical ablation model. Evaluated on the highly constrained Mg-Mn-O system, the results reveal a highly nuanced performance dichotomy between the advanced models. The architecture-matched classical ablation model demonstrated superior thermodynamic precision. Conversely, the integration of quantum circuits in the SH-QGAN drove unparalleled structural breadth and latent space exploration, more than doubling the ablation's geometric validity and successfully generating novel, metastable candidates converging on the Mg2MnO4 stoichiometry. These findings clarify that while architectural separation of cell and atom generation drives strict thermodynamic precision, quantum feature mapping independently provides the spatial diversity necessary to overcome mode collapse. Both mechanisms offer distinct, complementary enhancements for the generative discovery of advanced materials.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50\,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18\%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.

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

Anatomy of Post-Training: Using Interpretability to Characterize Data and Shape the Learning Signal

arXiv:2606.12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model post-training is the main stage at which model behavior is shaped, yet it still largely involves optimization of scalar rewards that summarize diverse desiderata. This abstraction gives practitioners little visibility into what their data actually teaches models, allowing spurious correlations to be learned by a model and inducing undesirable behaviors such as over-stylization and sycophancy. To address this problem, we ask: can we inspect a preference dataset before optimization and decide, at the level of concepts, which behaviors a model should be allowed to learn? Motivated by this, we introduce a data-centric post-training pipeline that uses interpretability protocols to develop statistical hypotheses for the latent concepts separating preferred from dispreferred generations, making them explicit for fine-grained user feedback. Building on this view, we unify several interpretability-based training protocols as ways of shaping rewards via feature or data interventions. Empirically, we show that our pipeline diagnoses undesirable signals in existing preference data, mitigates off-target learning, and can also help amplify or shape desired properties such as safeguards and model personality. More broadly, our results suggest that interpretability can turn post-training from optimizing opaque proxy rewards into a process of auditing and sculpting the learning signal itself.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dynamically frozen long-distance entanglement via non-Hermitian PT-symmetric systems

arXiv:2606.14177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In distributed quantum networks, interacting spin systems can mediate the generation of highly entangled links between distant nodes. We investigate the role of effective parity-time (PT)-symmetric non-Hermitian spin-1/2 bulks weakly coupled to two quantum links, obtained due to the environmental interactions affecting both the bulk and the links. Focusing on effective non-Hermitian nearest-neighbor (NN) Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models, we analyze how non-Hermiticity influences the dynamical formation of long-distance entanglement (LDE). For a paradigmatic model consisting of a quantum XX bulk subjected to imaginary staggered magnetic fields, we analytically determine the exceptional points arising from the resulting bulk-mediated interactions between the links. Combining analytical and numerical methods, we demonstrate that an initially fully separable state can dynamically evolve into highly entangled link states near these exceptional points in the broken regime. Further, after optimizing over time and system parameters, near-unit time-averaged entanglement between the links emerges under weak imaginary magnetic fields and bulk-link couplings, which cannot be attained in the corresponding Hermitian systems. Moreover, the non-Hermitian dynamics exhibit a freezing of high entanglement in the vicinity of exceptional points, a feature absent in Hermitian counterparts. We also identify regimes of long-range interaction strengths that yield a higher time-averaged entanglement than the corresponding NN models. Furthermore, we establish that LDE persists in the stationary regime, highlighting the promise of engineered non-Hermitian dynamics for realizing robust and frozen entangled links in quantum networks.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x–9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PhaseWY: A pipeline for haplotype phasing, sex chromosome identification and extraction of sex-limited sequences

Sex chromosomes are central to many ecological and evolutionary processes. Evidence has accumulated that sex chromosome systems vary extensively in age, turnover and transitions, motivating renewed efforts to study the diversity of sex chromosome systems across the tree of life. However, successful genomic detection of sex chromosomes depends on several factors, including the size and divergence time, background genetic diversity, and the number of sequenced females and males. In addition, technical challenges associated with sequencing and analysing the sex-limited Y/W chromosome remain. Here, we present PhaseWY, an automated Snakemake pipeline that uses whole-genome sequencing data from multiple female and male individuals to identify sex-chromosomal regions and extract the corresponding Y/W sequences. PhaseWY (i) detects sex differences in alignment depth, (ii) applies read-based and statistical haplotype phasing, (iii) identifies sex-linked regions using haplotype clustering, and (iv) subsets autosomal, X/Z- and Y/W-linked variants for downstream analyses. We applied PhaseWY to simulated data to benchmark factors influencing sex-linkage detection and successful extraction of Y/W-linked variants. To demonstrate its practical utility, we further applied PhaseWY to the neo-sex chromosome system in Alauda larks (Alaudidae) and performed a range of downstream analyses demonstrating the scope of applications of the PhaseWY output. We conclude that PhaseWY provides an easy-to-use and reproducible tool for population-genomic analyses in non-model organisms, with particular importance for advancing our understanding of sex-chromosome evolution.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A Robust Strontium Tweezer Apparatus for Quantum Computing

arXiv:2601.16564v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neutral atoms for quantum computing applications show promise in terms of scalability and connectivity. We demonstrate the realization of a versatile apparatus capable of stochastically loading a 5x5 array of optical tweezers with single $^{88}$Sr atoms featuring flexible magnetic field control and excellent optical access. A custom-designed oven, spin-flip Zeeman slower, and deflection stage produce a controlled flux of Sr directed to the science chamber. In the science chamber, featuring a vacuum pressure of $3 \times 10^{-11}$ mbar, the Sr is cooled using two laser cooling stages, resulting in $\sim 3 \times 10^5$ atoms at a temperature of 5(1) $\mu$K. The optical tweezers feature a $1/e^2$ waist of 0.81(2) $\mu$m, and loaded atoms can be imaged with a fidelity of $\sim 0.997$ and a survival probability of $0.99^{+0.01}_{-0.02}$. The atomic array presented here forms the core of a full-stack quantum computing processor targeted for quantum chemistry computational problems.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Structural Role Injection in Handlebars-Templated LLM Prompts: Triple-Brace Interpolation, Delimiter Family, and the Limits of HTML Auto-Escaping

Large language model applications build prompts from templates, and Handlebars is a widely used templating engine and the default prompt-template format in Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Its double-brace {{x}} expression HTML-escapes the interpolated value and is documented as the safe default; its triple-brace {{{x}}} expression inserts the value raw. We show that this choice silently governs an application's exposure to structural role injection, where attacker-controlled data carries chat role delimiters that forge a higher-privilege turn. A model-free analysis establishes the mechanism: Handlebars escaping rewrites angle brackets but not square brackets, colons, or Markdown hashes, so it neutralises ChatML, Llama-3, and XML role delimiters (survival rate 0.00) while leaving Llama-2 [INST], legacy Human:/Assistant:, and Markdown ### delimiters intact (survival rate 1.00 for the last two). We then run 5760 trials across seven delimiter families, two attack objectives, and four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5) at a combined API cost of 1.63 USD. GPT-3.5 Turbo follows the task-hijack instruction in 97% of raw and 91% of escaped trials, with the escaping protection concentrated in the angle-bracket families and absent for the colon- and Markdown-based families; the harder secret-exfiltration objective, which does not saturate, exposes the same family interaction more cleanly. Claude Haiku 4.5 resists both objectives almost entirely. The escaped default protects only the delimiter schemes whose characters HTML escaping happens to cover, gives no protection for the rest, and cannot substitute for a structural separation of instruction and data.