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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BrainWorld: A Structural-Prior-Conditioned Generative Model for Whole-Brain 4D fMRI Dynamics

Whole-brain 4D fMRI generation is valuable for modeling functional brain dynamics, yet existing fMRI foundation models mainly target representation learning and downstream prediction rather than conditional predictive generation. We introduce BrainWorld, a structural-prior-conditioned generative model for whole-brain 4D fMRI dynamics. BrainWorld uses sMRI as subject-level anatomical context to guide future fMRI generation, integrating structural information into the denoising process rather than treating it as a parallel modality. Evaluated on 22 datasets spanning diverse cohorts and brain states, BrainWorld generates stable 4D fMRI trajectories up to 400 frames, improves downstream performance through generated-example augmentation, and learns transferable multimodal representations that outperform baselines. Together, these results establish BrainWorld as a condition-aware generative framework for long-horizon brain dynamics modeling and multimodal representation learning.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Understanding Cross-Sensor Feature Variations for Generalizable 3D Perception

Radar-camera BEV perception often suffers from degraded performance when evaluated across datasets, as changes in driving scenes, sensor configurations, and environmental conditions can alter both the input observations and the internal fused representations. This work studies this issue from the perspective of source-domain variation modeling, aiming to improve the robustness of BEV-based 3D detectors without relying on target-domain samples. We introduce a framework that characterizes visual scene variations in the frequency domain and uses them to synthesize diverse source-domain views. By comparing the resulting fused BEV representations, the framework further captures how image-level variations influence multi-modal BEV features. These variation patterns are then used to regularize the detector, encouraging the learned fusion space to remain stable under latent scene changes. The proposed method is applied only during training and leaves the inference pipeline unchanged. Experiments on cross-dataset radar-camera 3D detection between View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple BEV fusion backbones, and the gains remain effective when a small amount of target-domain data is available.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Contrastive-Difference CKA Reveals Concept-Specific Structural Alignment Across Language Model Architectures

作者:

Do different LLM architectures encode high-level concepts in structurally compatible ways? We systematically characterize a geometric-functional universality dissociation: across multiple concept domains and architectural families, moderate geometric convergence coexists with near-perfect functional transfer. Using contrastive-difference CKA (CKA_Delta), a training-free diagnostic that computes kernel alignment on per-sample contrastive differences, we isolate concept-specific convergence from generic similarity – achieving significant discrimination where standard CKA cannot. The dissociation replicates across all six concept domains we test (five with p =70B models. We position CKA_Delta as a practical regime classifier and architectural outlier detector (Gemma: d = 1.08, AUC = 0.79) rather than an absolute transfer-accuracy predictor, providing a training-free diagnostic for cross-architecture concept monitoring.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the spatio-temporal increments of nonlinear parabolic SPDEs and the open KPZ equation

arXiv:2508.05032v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study spatio-temporal increments of the solutions to nonlinear parabolic SPDEs on a bounded interval with Dirichlet, Neumann, or Robin boundary conditions. We identify the exact local and uniform spatio-temporal moduli of continuity for the sample functions of the solutions. These moduli of continuity results imply the existence of random points in space-time at which spatio-temporal oscillations are exceptionally large. We also establish small-ball probability estimates and Chung-type laws of the iterated logarithm for spatio-temporal increments. Our method yields extension of some of these results to the open KPZ equation on the unit interval with inhomogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. Our key ingredients include new strong local non-determinism results for linear stochastic heat equation under various types of boundary conditions, and detailed estimates for the errors in linearization of spatio-temporal increments of the solution to the nonlinear equation.

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

Multi-View In-Cabin Monitoring System for Public Transport Vehicles

We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Among Changes in Inflammatory Biomarkers, Pain Intensity, and Health-Related Quality of Life Following a 12-Week Aerobic Exercise Programme in Individuals with Non-Specific Chronic Low Back Pain

Abstract Background: Non-specific chronic low back pain (NSCLBP) is associated with persistent pain, reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and low-grade systemic inflammation. This study examined associations among changes in inflammatory biomarkers, pain intensity, and HRQoL following a 12-week aerobic exercise programme. Methods: This secondary analysis used data from a randomized controlled trial involving 41 participants with NSCLBP (intervention, n = 21; control, n = 20). Participants received either supervised aerobic exercise plus health education or health education alone for 12 weeks. Change scores for tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-), interleukin-6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), pain intensity, and HRQoL domains were analysed using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Improvements in IL-6 (r = 0.434, p = 0.005) and hs-CRP (r = 0.444, p = 0.004) were significantly associated with improvements in pain intensity. No significant associations were observed between biomarker changes and HRQoL domains. Treatment allocation was the strongest independent predictor of improvement in physical HRQoL ({beta} = 0.492, p = 0.017) and pain intensity ({beta} = -0.512, p = 0.006). Conclusions: Improvements in IL-6 and hs-CRP were associated with reductions in pain intensity but not with improvements in HRQoL. Treatment allocation was the strongest predictor of clinical improvement, suggesting that mechanisms beyond systemic inflammation may contribute to the benefits of aerobic exercise in NSCLBP. Keywords: non-specific chronic low back pain; aerobic exercise; inflammation; interleukin-6; high-sensitivity C-reactive protein; pain intensity; health-related quality of life.

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

Learning Directional Semantic Transitions for Longitudinal Chest X-ray Analysis

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation often requires longitudinal comparison to assess disease progression. Existing approaches typically rely on temporal feature fusion or inter-study discrepancy modeling, yet remain limited in capturing subtle progression semantics and overlook the inherently directional nature of disease trajectories. In this paper, we propose ProTrans, a novel vision-language pretraining framework that formulates disease progression as a directional semantic transition between paired CXR studies. ProTrans leverages radiology reports to anchor individual CXR representations within interpretable disease states, and introduces a learnable progression feature map to explicitly encode semantic shifts between states, aligned with report-derived progression descriptions. To enforce direction-aware perception, ProTrans incorporates a reversed temporal modeling process and imposes bidirectional reconstruction consistency across states and transitions, thereby disentangling directional semantics and promoting coherent trajectory modeling. Extensive experiments on longitudinal downstream tasks, including disease progression classification and progression captioning, demonstrate that ProTrans consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a unified pretraining framework for longitudinal CXR understanding. https://github.com/RPIDIAL/ProTrans

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

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Pseudoperplexity Probes Memorization in Protein Language Models

Protein Language Models (pLMs) have significantly advanced computational biology. Yet their scale and reliance on redundant training data raise a fundamental question: do pLMs generalize the statistical grammar of proteins, or do they simply memorize their training data? To investigate this, we used pseudoperplexity as a probe for sequence-level memorization, comparing ProtT5's pseudoperplexity on a pre-training proxy dataset against a post-training holdout of genuinely novel sequences. To ensure a valid comparison, we matched the datasets by sequence length, cluster size, and taxonomic family. As a statistical baseline, we trained n-gram language models; analysis of higher-order n-gram composition and a statistically significant divergence in perplexity confirmed that the post-training sequences were genuinely novel at the local sequence level. ProtT5 showed a statistically significant difference in pseudoperplexity between seen and unseen sequences, though further analysis revealed this memorization signal to be modest. These findings suggest that ProtT5 exhibits detectable but limited memorization of its training data as measured by a pseudoperplexity-based probe.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Exploring Language-Agnosticity in Function Vectors: A Case Study in Machine Translation

Function vectors (FVs) are vector representations of tasks extracted from model activations during in-context learning. While prior work has shown that multilingual model representations can be language-agnostic, it remains unclear whether the same holds for function vectors. We study whether FVs exhibit language-agnosticity, using machine translation as a case study. Across three decoder-only multilingual LLMs, we find that translation FVs extracted from a single English$\to$X direction transfer to other target languages, consistently improving the rank of correct translation tokens across multiple unseen languages. We further find that the highest-gain tokens span multiple languages and that translation FVs across directions share most of their top-ranked heads, indicating that the FV encodes a largely language-agnostic translation signal rather than a language-pair-specific mapping.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SemChunk-C: Semantic Segmentation for C Code

arXiv:2606.23697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Semantic segmentation of code written in a C-family language remains a challenging problem, due to the language's complex syntax, macro expansion, and irregular structural patterns. Existing chunking methods, such as fixed-sized windows, heuristic splitting, and syntax-based tools, often fail to capture meaningful functional units, limiting the efficacy of retrieval and other downstream LLM driven tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of chunking in C-related languages. First, we define a set of code chunk categories. Second, we train an LLM-based classifier to a) identify chunk boundaries, and b) assign each chunk a descriptive functional attribute (a category), which can be useful for downstream tasks. By leveraging the LLM's ability to capture semantic context within the code, we assume flexible chunk boundaries, allowing to adapt to the specific structure and context of each instance. Third, we introduce SemChunk-C, a family of lightweight language models for semantic chunking of C-related files (.c, .cpp, .h, .cs, etc.). These models are based on the first four Ettin encoders [1] with 17M, 32M, 68M, and 150M parameters. Despite their relatively small size, they are capable of identifying cohesive code units, such as data structures, interface blocks, and other components. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach on real-world code, including challenging constructs such as nested definitions and macros. We test our approach on various datasets, and show that it achieves high boundary accuracy and semantic coherence, matching or outperforming chunkers that are based on much larger code-oriented LLMs. We also validate the improved performance of the downstream tasks on a few curated benchmarks.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quasilinear Equivalence Checking for Detector Error Models

arXiv:2606.14677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A Detector Error Model (DEM) is a structured representation of error mechanisms in quantum circuits, which has gained popularity in quantum compilation pipelines for its ability to capture fault-tolerance at a circuit level. It lists error mechanisms as instructions targeting detectors and observables, specifying for each physical fault channel the probability that the fault fires, the detectors it triggers, and the observables it flips. In this paper, we develop an equational theory for DEMs, with its associated categorical semantics. We present a sound, terminating, confluent rewriting system for DEM terms, formulating it as a symmetric monoidal theory (a PROP) over the Giry monad. We prove that every DEM term has a unique normal form, which can be computed efficiently in quasilinear time $O(k|E|\log|E|)$, where $|E|$ is the number of instructions and $k$ bounds the size of a target set. This provides a complete set of invariants (via Tanner graphs) for structural DEM equivalence. We provide the first static decision procedure for DEM equivalence, with rigorous correctness guarantees. It is complete (decides full decoder-equivalence exactly) for non-adaptive quantum error correction (QEC) pipelines, and scales to a sound and applicable decision procedure for partially-adaptive circuits (lattice surgery, distributed QEC, ...) without suffering exponential overhead. We discuss its application to the verification and optimisation of quantum compilers.

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

Entity Labels Are Not Entity Signals: A Framework for Observable Relevance in Document Re-Ranking

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validation of a Smartphone-Image-Based Computer-Vision Model for Lean Mass and Body Fat Estimation Against Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry

Introduction Body composition, rather than body weight alone, is an increasingly important health metric, and preservation of lean mass has become a central concern in obesity treatment, aging, and chronic disease management. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) provides accurate assessment of fat and lean tissue, but its cost and logistical requirements limit repeated measurement. Computer-vision approaches show promise for estimating adiposity from smartphone images, but lean-mass estimation remains less established. Methods We evaluated a computer-vision body composition model, applied to consumer-grade smartphone photographs, against DXA in a held-out validation sample of 195 adults from an ongoing cross-sectional study. Body fat percentage and total lean mass percentage were co-primary outcomes; for total lean mass percentage, an image-only configuration (no added covariates) was pre-specified as primary. Agreement was quantified using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) as the lead statistic, with Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean bias, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement. In secondary analyses, appendicular lean mass and total lean mass percentage were each estimated with and without routine anthropometric and demographic inputs (body weight, height, age, and sex). Results Total lean mass percentage agreed with DXA from image features alone (CCC 0.916). Body fat percentage, estimated with routine inputs added, agreed at least as closely (CCC 0.930). Adding routine inputs barely changed agreement for total lean mass percentage but markedly improved it for appendicular lean mass, an absolute quantity that scales with body size. Conclusions A smartphone-image-based model estimated both body fat and lean mass with strong agreement to DXA, with lean mass percentage from image features alone. The approach needs no fixed equipment or ionizing radiation. Whether it can track change over time, including in incretin-based weight loss where lean mass preservation is a concern, was not assessed in this cross-sectional study.

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

CoIRL-AD: Collaborative-Competitive Imitation-Reinforcement Learning in Latent World Models for Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models trained with imitation learning (IL) often generalize poorly, particularly in long-tail scenarios where expert demonstrations are sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL) can provide complementary task-level supervision, but applying RL to real-world autonomous driving is challenging in offline settings without interactive simulators, where datasets are dominated by expert actions and provide limited behavioral diversity. We propose CoIRL-AD, a competitive dual-policy framework that integrates IL and RL under a unified offline training regime. CoIRL-AD decouples imitation and reward optimization into separate actors to alleviate objective conflicts, uses imagined future rollouts for long-horizon reward estimation, and introduces a competition mechanism that selectively transfers beneficial behaviors while keeping RL anchored to expert-like driving. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that CoIRL-AD consistently improves robustness over strong IL-based baselines, with especially large gains in cross-city generalization and long-tail scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/SEU-zxj/CoIRL-AD.

20.
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.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

22.
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.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The Simplified Stabilizer ZX-Calculus is Minimal

arXiv:2606.12383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The stabilizer fragment of the ZX calculus is amongst the most important fragments of the theory. The closely related Clifford+T fragment is approximately universal (arXiv:1705.11151). Additionally, the stabilizer calculus can be described by a small collection of rewrites, most of which have been shown to be necessary (arXiv:1709.08903). However, two rules, describing the red/green compact-structure coincidence and the important bialgebra law, had not been shown to be necessary. We present a countermodel-style argument showing that both of these rules are individually necessary relative to the connectivity meta-rule of Backens–Perdrix–Wang (arXiv:1709.08903), and hence establish that the rule set presented in arXiv:1709.08903 has no redundant rewrite rule.

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

Optimal Shadow Estimation with Minimal Measurement Settings

arXiv:2606.20003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shadow estimation is a powerful framework for predicting quantum properties from randomized measurements. While $3$-design protocols achieve optimal worst-case performance, the minimal number of measurement bases required for such optimality has remained open. Here we prove that $\Theta(d^2)$ measurement bases are both necessary and sufficient for worst-case optimal shadow estimation and construct an explicit basis family. In stark contrast, any state $2$-design already suffices for average-case optimality: the mean squared shadow norm of normalized observables is bounded by a universal constant, and we prove strong concentration for Haar-random states, yielding constant sample complexity for generic pure-state fidelity estimation. Easily implementable $2$-designs – from mutually unbiased bases, cyclic measurements, or shallow $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-depth circuits – enable optimal average-case protocols with remarkably simple measurement strategies. Our results establish a fundamental complexity separation: worst-case estimation requires $\Theta(d^2)$ bases, whereas average-case performance requires only $\Theta(d)$ bases, with broad implications for quantum information theory and near-term experiments.

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

When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.