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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum optimal control of the Dicke manifold in dipolar Rydberg atom arrays

arXiv:2606.02283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to engineer and control quantum states of many-body systems is a central challenge in quantum information science. For a register of $N$ qubits, the full Hilbert space dimension grows exponentially as $2^N$, rendering generic state preparation and control infeasible without exploiting structure or symmetry. A particularly important and physically motivated restriction is to the fully symmetric subspace, spanned by the Dicke states, which are simultaneous eigenstates of collective spin $J=N/2$. Ensembles of Rydberg atoms interacting via electric dipoles in two-dimensional tweezer arrays form a promising platform for achieving such control. However, the finite range of dipole-dipole interactions poses a challenge to generating and controlling the Dicke manifold because the Hamiltonian incurs leakage from the computational subspace. To counteract this leakage, we perform quantum optimal control algorithms on a truncated Hilbert space according to our newly developed method of ``irrep distillation'' (IRD), which captures the process by which the symmetric subspace couples to leakage error-spaces, using only linear-scaling Hilbert dimension. We implement gradient ascent pulse engineering (GrAPE) on control schemes with little or no local addressing, to generate resourceful states like Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, Dicke, and extremal quantum states. We benchmark each scheme of IRD-GrAPE for its quantum speed limit (QSL), as well as exactly testing pulse fidelities on small system sizes and predicting fidelities using higher-order IRD on larger systems.

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

RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization

Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector. Under RoPE, however, a key's contribution to a future attention logit decomposes into a position-dependent sum over two-dimensional frequency blocks. This makes key-cache quantization a block-wise bit-allocation problem: high-energy RoPE blocks are more sensitive to quantization error and should receive more bits. We introduce Block-GTQ, a RoPE-aware bit allocator for key-cache quantization built on TurboQuant-MSE(TQ-MSE). For each layer and KV head, Block-GTQ computes a label-free energy score for each RoPE block and greedily allocates integer bit widths by marginal gain. Under matched K/V bit budgets, Block-GTQ better preserves RoPE query-key logits on a ten-model diagnostic panel, cutting per-layer MAE by 32-80% at 2 and 3 b/dim K-only quantization and winning all 367/367 layer comparisons against uniform TQ-MSE. These fidelity gains translate to stronger downstream long-context retrieval, understanding, and reasoning. At K2V2 on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task NIAH average from 70.6 to 97.4, and the LongBench-EN average from 36.87 to 53.31. On AIME 2024/2025 with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B, without an fp16 recent-key buffer, Block-GTQ at K3V2 scores 51.7/37.5, close to fp16's 54.2/37.9, whereas uniform TQ-MSE collapses to 0.0/0.0. We further implement a packed-cache serving path. On a single H800 GPU with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 achieves 3.24x KV-cache compression with fp16-comparable quality, runs 1.34x faster than fp16 FlashAttention2 at 128K context, reduces peak memory from 56.31 GB to 19.85 GB, and remains feasible at 256K and 512K where fp16 OOMs. Code is available at https://github.com/JIA-Lab-research/blockgtq.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Deployment-readiness audit of calibration, clinical utility, and fairness in perioperative infection prediction

Objective: Clinical risk scores intended to guide patient-level decisions can show strong average performance. However, predicted probabilities can be systematically too high or too low in specific subgroups even when overall performance is strong. We audited deployment readiness of a strong end-of-surgery postoperative infection model across clinically relevant subgroups and tested mitigation strategies in miscalibrated subgroups. Materials and Methods: We analyzed out-of-fold predictions for 10,719 surgical procedures at a Swiss tertiary hospital, with 504 postoperative bacterial infection events. Prespecified axes were recorded sex, age stratum, and an EHR-derived physiological-reserve proxy. Within subgroups and pairwise intersections, we evaluated discrimination, calibration, threshold-specific errors, and decision-curve net benefit at the prespecified operating threshold. We compared group-specific isotonic recalibration with Wasserstein-barycenter postprocessing and demonstrated portability in SUPPORT2. Results: Overall AUROC was 0.876. While sex-marginal discrimination was similar in women and men (0.878 vs 0.875), age and reserve stratification revealed deployment-readiness failures. Calibration-in-the-large ranged from -0.86 in frail patients to -2.47 in non-frail patients. At the 0.10 operating threshold, decision-curve net benefit was positive in frail patients but negative in pre-frail and non-frail patients. Isotonic recalibration corrected average physiological-reserve-stratified calibration without worsening Brier scores, whereas Wasserstein postprocessing worsened calibration in most procedure clusters. Discussion: Discrimination-only or sex-marginal evaluation would have missed subgroup failures with clinical-utility implications. Conclusion: Subgroup fairness audits for clinical deployment should jointly evaluate discrimination, calibration, and utility. We implemented the audit as the open-source isitfair framework for identifying deployment-relevant subgroup failures, comparing mitigation strategies, and generating structured reports.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Bias-Controlled Primal-Dual Natural Actor-Critic: Optimal Rates for Constrained Multi-Objective Average-Reward RL

arXiv:2606.25012v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting require optimizing multiple conflicting objectives while satisfying multiple safety constraints. A common approach is concave scalarization, where the agent maximizes a utility $ f(J^\pi_{r_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{r_M}) $ subject to a scalarized constraint $ g(J^\pi_{c_1}, \ldots, J^\pi_{c_N}) \ge 0 $, where $J^\pi_{r_m}$ and $J^\pi_{c_n}$ denote the average-reward and cost under policy $\pi$. However, the nonlinearity of $f$ and $g$ introduces bias in policy-gradient and actor-critic methods, since gradients must be evaluated using noisy estimates of $J^\pi,$ and $ \mathbb{E}[\partial f(J^\pi)] \neq \partial f(\mathbb{E}[J^\pi]),$ and this bias propagates through both primal and dual updates. We propose an MLMC-based primal-dual Natural Actor-Critic algorithm for average-reward MDPs that controls bias in scalarized objectives, constraint evaluation, and actor-critic estimation without requiring mixing-time knowledge. We show that the algorithm achieves optimal global convergence and constraint-violation rates of $ \tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T}) $. To our knowledge, this is the first result establishing optimal convergence for concave scalarized multi-objective RL in the average-reward setting, both with and without constraints, and the first to do so without mixing-time information even in the absence of scalarization.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

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

Degree-preserving conservative processes and a unified approach for their hydrodynamics

arXiv:2604.03548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate a broad class of large-scale one-dimensional interacting systems characterized by a single conservation law and satisfying the "degree-preserving property". Under mild and natural assumptions, we establish a unified framework for the analysis of both invariant measures and hydrodynamic limits. In particular, we prove that when the generator preserves the degree of polynomials of the state variables up to order two, the marginals of any product invariant measure must belong to a family of six specific distributions. This classification is shown to be consistent with a classical result on univariate natural exponential families due to C.N. Morris, which we apply here for the first time in the context of microscopic stochastic systems. As a consequence, we construct a new interacting particle system whose invariant measure is given by the generalized hyperbolic secant distribution. Furthermore, we prove that, despite the generality of the dynamics, the macroscopic behavior of all models in this class is governed by the classical heat equation, with a diffusion coefficient depending explicitly on the underlying microscopic interactions.

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

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

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

From Affect Prediction to Affect Forecasting: Evidence for Distinct Information Sources in Longitudinal Text

Modeling dimensional affect in longitudinal text requires distinguishing current affect estimation from future affective change forecasting. Existing approaches often treat each text as an independent observation and apply similar assumptions to both tasks, without testing whether they rely on different information sources. This paper investigates that distinction using longitudinal self-reported ecological essays and feeling-word entries. We propose the Trait–State Affective Prediction (TSAP) framework and its temporal extension E-TSAP for per-text valence and arousal prediction, evaluated on a held-out prediction test set of 1,737 entries from 91 users. We further propose the Affective Change Forecaster Hybrid (ACF-Hybrid) for next-step affective change forecasting, evaluated on a held-out forecasting test set of 46 users. For prediction, E-TSAP achieves composite Pearson correlations of 0.670 for valence and 0.449 for arousal. For forecasting, textual representations perform worse than compact numeric trajectory baselines: the text-inclusive model achieves only r=0.316 for valence and r=0.284 for arousal, whereas a simple prior-state baseline reaches r=0.615 and r=0.670, respectively. ACF-Hybrid, using dimension-specific numeric trajectory features, achieves r=0.659 for valence and $r=0.658$ for arousal. These results show that textual semantics support current affect prediction, whereas future affective change is better captured through prior numeric trajectory dynamics.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Accurate computation of the energy variance and $\langle\langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle\rangle$ using iPEPS

arXiv:2511.22669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS) provide a powerful tensor network ansatz for two-dimensional quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit. In this paper we introduce an approach to accurately compute the energy variance of an iPEPS, enabling systematic extrapolations of the ground-state energy to the exact zero-variance limit. It is based on the contraction of a large cell of tensors using the corner transfer matrix renormalization group (CTRMG) method, to evaluate the correlator between pairs of local Hamiltonian terms. We show that the accuracy of this approach is substantially higher than that of previous methods, and we demonstrate the usefulness of variance extrapolation for the Heisenberg model, for a free fermionic model, and for the Shastry-Sutherland model. Finally, we apply the approach to compute $\langle \langle \mathcal{L}^\dagger \mathcal{L} \rangle \rangle$ for an open quantum system described by the Liouvillian $\mathcal{L}$, in order to assess the quality of the steady-state solution and to locate first-order phase transitions, using the dissipative quantum Ising model as an example.

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

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

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

Efficient Time Series Clustering from Multiscale Reservoir Dynamics with Granular-Ball Anchoring Graph Optimization

arXiv:2606.12077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series clustering remains challenging due to the inherent trade-off between clustering effectiveness and computational efficiency. Similarity-based methods often suffer from quadratic complexity caused by pairwise distance computations, while deep learning-based approaches typically rely on costly iterative training and a large number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose MSRGC-Net, an efficient time-series clustering framework that integrates multiscale reservoir computing, granular-ball-based anchoring graph construction, and consensus learning. MSRGC-Net adopts a training-free reservoir computing paradigm to extract multiscale temporal representations from raw time series without backpropagation, significantly reducing computational overhead. To capture the intrinsic structure of the resulting representations, granular-ball computing is employed to adaptively model data distributions via density-consistent regions, yielding compact and robust anchor graph representations. Furthermore, a consensus-based anchoring graph optimization strategy is introduced to effectively align multiscale reservoir representations and integrate complementary information across temporal scales. Extensive experiments on widely used univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSRGC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Motion-Focused Latent Action Enables Cross-Embodiment VLA Training from Human EgoVideos

Training generalist Vision-Language-Action(VLA) models typically requires massive, diverse robotic datasets with high-fidelity action annotations. While egocentric human manipulation videos are abundant and capture significant environmental diversity, the absence of action labels makes them difficult to use in conventional training paradigms. To address this, we propose a latent-action-based framework designed to extract general action priors from unlabeled human videos. The architecture features a Hybrid Disentangled VQ-VAE that decouples motion dynamics from environmental backgrounds through physical masks, enabling the construction of a cross-embodiment action codebook. By pre-training on human videos with the codebook, the VLM backbone learns deep representations of action intent. For adaptation to specific embodiments, we introduce an intent-perception decoupling strategy where the VLM predicts the action intent while a separate frozen visual encoder provides state-specific features to the action expert, thereby reducing action hallucinations. Results in simulation and real-world environments show that our method, pre-trained exclusively on unlabeled human videos, performs competitively with state-of-the-art VLA models trained on massive annotated datasets, requiring only 50 trajectories for downstream adaptation.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Dual-Branch Cross-Projection Debiasing through Diffusion-based Disentanglement

Foundation models trained on biased datasets often rely on spurious correlations between target labels and non-causal attributes, resulting in poor generalization on minority groups. Bias mitigation remains challenging due to two fundamental issues. First, when group labels are unavailable, existing group-unsupervised methods typically infer spurious attributes implicitly from model behavior, making it difficult to identify spurious factors that are semantically aligned with real-world biases. Second, even with pseudo spurious supervision, most existing debiasing methods follow a single-branch design that operates within a single shared feature space, where target and spurious attributes are intrinsically entangled. To address the first challenge, we introduce Confidence-guided Bias Concept Mining (CBCM), which leverages diffusion-disentangled, semantically grounded concept representations to identify reliable spurious attributes without attribute annotations. To address the second challenge, we propose Dual-branch Cross-projection Debiasing (DCD), a prompt-tuning framework that separates target and spurious representations into two branches and explicitly removes spurious information through cross null-space projection while preserving target-relevant semantics. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art worst group accuracy among group-unsupervised approaches, while tuning at most 0.22% of the model parameters. The source code is available in the supplementary materials.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

VibeThinker-3B: Exploring the Frontier of Verifiable Reasoning in Small Language Models

This technical report introduces VibeThinker-3B, a compact dense model with 3B parameters developed to investigate how far verifiable reasoning can be pushed within a strictly small-model regime. Building upon the Spectrum-to-Signal post-training paradigm, we systematically enhance the model through an optimized pipeline that includes curriculum-based supervised fine-tuning, multi-domain reinforcement learning, and offline self-distillation. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VibeThinker-3B achieves frontier-level performance on highly demanding verifiable tasks. Specifically, it attains a score of 94.3 on AIME26 (improving to 97.1 with claim-level test-time scaling), an 80.2 Pass@1 on LiveCodeBench v6, and exhibits strong out-of-distribution generalization with a 96.1\% acceptance rate on recent unseen LeetCode contests. This effectively places it in the performance band of first-tier reasoning systems, matching or exceeding flagship models that are orders of magnitude larger, such as DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, and Gemini 3 Pro. Furthermore, a score of 93.4 on IFEval confirms that this extreme reasoning enhancement does not compromise strict instruction controllability. Extending our previous 1.5B work, these findings motivate the Parametric Compression-Coverage Hypothesis, which views verifiable reasoning as compressible into compact reasoning cores, while open-domain knowledge and general-purpose competence require broad parameter coverage over facts, concepts, and long-tail scenarios. This perspective suggests that compact models are not merely deployment-efficient substitutes, but a complementary path toward frontier-level performance in parameter-dense capability regimes.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

AI Coaching for Accelerating Human Skill Development with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.25337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI copilots can substantially boost human performance through shared control, but excessive assistance can induce over-reliance and skill atrophy. This paper studies how an embodied AI agent can act as a coach that accelerates human motor-skill development. We argue that effective coaching requires strategic scaffolding and stepping back that are aligned with the learner's capability, allowing productive failures that drive learning. We formalize the interactive AI coaching process as a non-cooperative dynamic game in which the learner optimizes task performance while the coach targets the learner's independent competence. Building on this formalism, we develop a reinforcement learning framework combining adaptive shared control with probabilistic models of the coach's causal influence on skill evolution, enabling tractable training of coaching policies. A comprehensive user study (N=33) on first-person-view drone racing shows significant gains in human learning outcomes over state-of-the-art AI coaching baselines.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Biological meaning in protein embedding space is resolution-dependent

Protein language model embeddings are increasingly used to organise biological sequences, yet how biological meaning is encoded within embedding neighbourhoods remains poorly understood. Using two independent hierarchical enzyme systems, carbohydrate-active enzymes and peptidases, we investigated how biological interpretation changes across embedding organisations aligned to different levels of biological hierarchy. Different embedding organisations give rise to distinct neighbourhood semantics. When aligned to membership-boundary resolution, embeddings robustly separated artefacts and unrelated proteins from members of the target category. However, embeddings aligned to functional-grouping resolution maintained compositional neighbourhood structure for multi-domain proteins spanning more than one functional or catalytic group. Finally, embeddings aligned to local-family resolution recovered compact family-like neighbourhoods, including families withheld from training, while weakening broader membership-boundary and functional-grouping relationships. Moreover, embeddings optimised toward the same level of biological organisation retain different biological relationships depending on optimisation trajectory employed. Together, our results show that proximity in protein embedding space has no fixed biological interpretation. Instead, biological meaning emerges across embedding resolutions through selective preservation of different forms of biological organisation.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Improving Neural Network Training by Decoupling the Magnitude and Direction of Weight Vectors

arXiv:2606.25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities – a magnitude and a direction – and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose Magnitude–Direction (MD) Decoupling, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

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

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

arXiv:2503.17867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.