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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-Semantic Co-optimized Latent Diffusion Model for Fast Visual Anagram Synthesis

Visual anagram is an intriguing form of art creation wherein a single image presents different conceptual interpretations under transformations such as flipping or rotation. Recent work has achieved visual anagram synthesis by leveraging pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, yet still suffers from several key limitations including computational inefficiency, suboptimal aesthetic quality, and weak semantic fidelity and expressiveness. This work focuses on generating visual anagrams with substantially improved visual quality at minimal computational cost, thereby advancing intelligent creation of illusionary digital art. To increase image resolution while reducing time overhead, we adapt the cutting-edge parallel denoising algorithm from pixel-based T2I model to the adversarially distilled latent-based one, and accordingly propose a structure-semantic co-optimization (S2CO) framework to counteract the consequent visual degradation. As the core of our approach, S2CO framework comprises three key innovations: (\romannumeral1) null-text structure alignment optimization; (\romannumeral2) semantic enhancement optimization; (\romannumeral3) attention-guided noise fusion. Building upon these components, our method dubbed S2CO-Anagram is able to generate higher-resolution anagram images with noticeably superior visual harmony and semantic faithfulness than related SOTA approaches, all while achieving substantially faster inference speed. Code will be publicly available.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multimodal Graph Negative Learning

arXiv:2606.12863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs) integrate graph topology with heterogeneous modality attributes, such as text and images, thereby enabling richer modeling of complex relational systems. However, such expressiveness also makes learning on MAGs depend on multiple semantic sources, including structural topology, textual and visual attributes, each of which can be regarded as a branch for node representation. Node-level branch semantic imbalance arises when these branches differ across nodes in semantic informativeness and reliability: a branch that provides discriminative semantics for one node may mislead another due to bias in modality quality or structural context. Existing methods often mitigate such heterogeneity through cross-branch agreement or alignment, implicitly treating the dominant prediction as reliable supervision. When the dominant branch is biased, forced imitation may propagate its bias to other branches and suppress original semantics that are useful for classification. We propose GraphMNL, a graph-aware multimodal negative learning framework that addresses this issue by using Negative Learning as cross-branch guidance. Instead of forcing inferior branches to imitate a teacher prediction, the model teaches them which classes a node is unlikely to belong to. GraphMNL builds a branch library, identifies dominant and inferior branches via graph-aware reliability arbitration, gates unstable transfer, and applies target-preserving negative learning over non-target classes. This design decouples target supervision from branch guidance so that supervised losses learn the correct class, while Negative Learning suppresses unlikely alternatives when branch agreement is unreliable. Through the comprehensive experimental evaluation, GraphMNL achieves the best performance on Grocery datasets with 72.47% accuracy and 76.60 F1 score on Reddit M datasets.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modeling. Existing methods for uncertainty modeling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous connections between their specific objectives and epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework grounded in possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, project it to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximate the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that DAPPr achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance over state-of-the-art second-order predictors while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

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

Domain-Guided Prompting of the Segment Anything Model for Seismic Interpretation: The Role of Attributes, Visualization, and Hybrid Prompts

The advent of large pretrained foundation models for computer vision has significantly improved the efficiency of visual data interpretation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), in particular, offers powerful zero shot segmentation capabilities through prompt based interaction, thus making it a promising tool for seismic interpretation. However, most existing applications of SAM rely on fine tuning for specific geological targets, which requires extensive labeled data, incurs high computational cost, and often compromises the model's generalization capability. In this study, we introduce a principled framework for zero shot adaptation of foundation models to seismic data. The framework is built on two key components: (1) aligning seismic attributes and visualization choices (e.g., colormaps) with the geological target of interest, and (2) employing a hybrid prompting strategy that combines sparse user defined point prompts with dense mask prompts derived from SAM's internal feature activations. We systematically evaluate this framework across multiple geological targets, datasets, prompt configurations, and seismic attribute representations. Our results demonstrate that geologic target aware selection of seismic attributes and colormaps, combined with hybrid prompting, enhances the separability of geological features and improves boundary delineation and segmentation accuracy relative to point based prompting alone. Our findings show that, when these components are jointly applied, SAM can achieve competitive segmentation performance in a fully zero shot setting, thereby eliminating the need to retrain SAM for each geologic feature. This work establishes a practical and scalable pathway to leverage foundation models in seismic interpretation, reducing reliance on labeled data while preserving model generality.

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

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

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

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generalised Eigenvalue Geometry of Semantic Adversarial Attacks

arXiv:2606.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent empirical work shows that semantically equivalent paraphrases can fool financial sentiment classifiers: although a paraphrase remains close to the original under a strong reference embedding, it may shift the target model's representation enough to change the predicted class. Existing robustness theory either assumes a single-model threat model or focuses mainly on empirical attack algorithms. We develop a continuous local model of semantic paraphrase perturbations that captures this two-model structure. We show that the worst-case local displacement of the target representation, subject to a proxy-model budget, is governed by the largest generalised eigenvalue of a matrix pencil $(A,B)$ constructed from the Jacobians of the two embedding maps. The resulting attackability index $\lambda^*(x)$ is intrinsic to the local paraphrase geometry and the chosen embedders, yields a closed-form prediction-flip condition for affine readouts, and supports conservative population and finite-sample attackability certificates. For uniform control over classes of affine readouts, we derive a distribution-free VC bound for binary attackability indicators and a scale-sensitive margin bound based on an attackability-adjusted margin that subtracts a local geometric penalty from the standard classifier margin. We also connect the continuous theory to discrete paraphrase search, identify an asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful finite searches, and give a covering condition under which the discrete and continuous settings agree. Finally, we propose an empirical verification framework using soft-token relaxations and generated paraphrase sets to assess the local eigenvalue geometry, prediction-flip condition, and finite-search approximation on a deployed financial-text classifier.

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

TouchThinker: Scaling Tactile Commonsense Reasoning to the Open World with Large-scale Data and Action-aware Representation

arXiv:2606.11637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Touch is a key modality for embodied agents to understand the physical world. Although recent work has incorporated tactile signals into language systems for tactile commonsense reasoning, scaling such systems to realistic open-world settings remains challenging due to two key bottlenecks: (1) current tactile reasoning datasets remain limited in format and scale, providing insufficient supervision for reasoning from tactile observations to physical commonsense and hindering the learning of transferable tactile commonsense; (2) Tactile signals are inherently redundant and action-specific, yet existing methods often overlook these properties, resulting in inefficient representations with limited semantic expressiveness. To address these limitations, we propose TouchThinker, a tactile-language framework that scales tactile commonsense reasoning to the open world from both data and representation perspectives. First, we construct TouchThinker-1M, a million-scale, multi-source tactile reasoning dataset covering 415 objects, 8 scenarios, and 7 sensor types, providing a solid data foundation for open-world generalization. We further introduce TouchThinker-Bench, an open-world benchmark with more realistic and diverse tasks. Then, we propose action-aware modeling mechanism to improve tactile representation efficiency and enable efficient reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that TouchThinker achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. Our code and dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/lvkailin0118/TouchThinker.

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

Persuasion Index: A Theory-Guided Framework for Persuasion Analysis

Identifying persuasive rhetorical cues is critical across domains, from detecting information manipulation and improving AI safety to advancing public health communication. We propose Persuasion Index (PI), a taxonomy of 15 dimensions grounded in persuasion theories from psychology and communication, and one transparent implementation using 55 sub-features built from lexicons and rule-based detectors. The taxonomy is modular: individual detectors can be replaced while preserving the theoretical structure. By evaluating PI on four public datasets varying in domain, style, and outcome measures, we show that PI provides a shared feature space for interpreting rhetorical patterns associated with persuasion-related outcomes. Linear models show that PI features carry meaningful predictive signal while remaining computationally lightweight. Dimension-level analyses reveal recurring associations between PI dimensions and persuasion outcomes across datasets, while also highlighting topic- and stance-specific variation. We release PI as an open-source package and web interface for principled and auditable analysis of human and AI-mediated communication.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

CoRe-MoE: Contrastive Reweighted Mixture of Experts for Multi-Terrain Humanoid Locomotion with Gait Adaptation

arXiv:2606.04718v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans primarily rely on walking and running to traverse complex terrains. Similarly, humanoid robots should be able to smoothly transition between walking and running while maintaining natural and stable locomotion. However, unifying gait transition and multi-terrain adaptation within a single policy remains challenging due to gradient interference between tasks and the distribution shift caused by terrain variations. Although Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can mitigate multi-skill interference, direct joint training often fails to achieve clear expert specialization. To address these challenges, we propose CoRe-MoE, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that decouples gait generation from terrain adaptation. In the first stage, a stable locomotion policy is learned to produce natural walking and running behaviors with smooth transitions. In the second stage, a terrain-aware MoE branch is introduced, and the gating network is trained with a contrastive objective to learn structured terrain representations and promote expert specialization. The final action is obtained through weighted fusion of the base gait policy and the terrain-aware branch, enabling the policy to preserve stable locomotion while adapting to complex terrains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches in terms of success rate, locomotion stability, and multi-terrain adaptability. Furthermore, zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot validates the effectiveness of our framework, achieving robust walking and running across stairs, slopes, steps, obstacles, and unstructured outdoor terrains while maintaining accurate foothold control and dynamic stability.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

From Seeing to Experiencing: Scaling Navigation Foundation Models with Reinforcement Learning

Navigation foundation models trained on massive web-scale data enable agents to generalize across diverse environments and embodiments. However, these models, which are trained solely on offline data, often lack the capacity to reason about the consequences of their actions or adapt through counterfactual understanding. They thus face significant limitations in real-world urban navigation, where interactive and safe behaviors, such as avoiding obstacles and moving pedestrians, are critical. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Seeing-to-Experiencing (S2E) learning framework to scale the capability of navigation foundation models with reinforcement learning. S2E combines the strengths of pretraining on offline videos and post-training through reinforcement learning. It maintains the model's generalizability acquired from large-scale real-world videos while enhancing its interactivity through reinforcement learning in simulation environments. Specifically, we introduce two innovations: (1) an Anchor-Guided Distribution Matching strategy for offline pretraining, which stabilizes learning and models diverse motion patterns through anchor-based supervision; and (2) a Residual-Attention Module for reinforcement learning, which obtains reactive behaviors from simulation environments without erasing the model's pretrained knowledge. Moreover, we establish a comprehensive end-to-end evaluation benchmark, NavBench-GS, built on photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of real-world scenes that incorporate physical interactions. It can systematically assess the generalizability and safety of navigation foundation models.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Riemannian Approach to Low-Rank Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.12120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank optimal transport (OT) mitigates the quadratic scaling of classical solvers, yet existing approaches rely heavily on first-order mirror-descent updates that require careful hyperparameter tuning and ignore the optimization landscape's curvature. To address these limitations, we propose a unified Riemannian geometric framework for low-rank OT, modeling balanced and unbalanced rank-$r$ positive factored couplings as novel smooth embedded submanifolds of the positive orthant. By equipping these manifolds with the Fisher-Rao product metric, we derive tractable formulations for Riemannian projectors, retractions, and Hessian-vector products. Our cost-agnostic framework seamlessly extends to linear OT, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW), fused GW, and their unbalanced counterparts. For balanced OT, our geometric ingredients are computed via efficient conjugate-gradient and iterative Bregman updates. For the unbalanced OT, our operations elegantly reduce to closed-form scalings, completely eliminating inner iterative loops. In both regimes, per-iteration complexity scales linearly with dataset size, and we provide a rank-sufficiency certificate for global optimality verification. Extensive experiments across a range of problem sizes demonstrate that our regularization-free first- and second-order solvers achieve faster convergence and superior performance over existing state-of-the-art low-rank OT solvers.

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

Single-Step Phase-Engineered Pulse for Active Readout Cavity Reset in Superconducting Circuits

arXiv:2512.08393v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In a circuit QED architecture, we experimentally demonstrate a hardware-efficient and qubit-state-dependent Single-Step Phase-Engineered (SSPE) pulse scheme for actively depopulating a readout cavity. The protocol appends a reset segment with tailored amplitude and phase to a standard square readout pulse. Within the linear-response regime, the optimal reset amplitude scales proportionally with the readout amplitude, while the optimal reset phase remains invariant, significantly simplifying the experimental calibration procedure. Time-resolved measurements of the cavity photon number dynamics demonstrate that the SSPE scheme significantly outperforms the CLEAR protocol in terms of reset speed. Crucially, this approach enables arbitrarily fast, overshoot-free depletion of the cavity photon population, with the ultimate reset rate constrained by the finite analog bandwidth of the measurement chain. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the QND nature demonstrates that the SSPE scheme introduces no additional non-QND measurement errors. It exhibits non-QNDness comparable to both the free-decay and CLEAR protocols, with residual errors predominantly governed by state switching induced by qubit relaxation during the readout process. Thses results establish the SSPE scheme as a practical and scalable approach for achieving rapid and smooth cavity reset in superconducting quantum circuits.

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

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

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

Structured Testbench Generation for LLM-Driven HDL Design and Verification-Oriented Data Curation

arXiv:2606.12983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated testbench generation has become a critical bottleneck in large language model (LLM)-driven Register Transfer Level (RTL) workflows, where large numbers of candidate designs must be verified rapidly and reliably. Existing prompt-based approaches treat testbench generation as unconstrained code synthesis, yielding stochastic outputs with high token cost, low reproducibility, and insufficient coverage. To address this gap, we present STG, a Structured Testbench Generation framework that exploits the inherent structure of hardware designs to generate deterministic testbenches. As a direct verification tool, STG runs 720x faster than an iterative LLM-based testbench generation flow and higher rate of successful compilation, achieves higher coverage, and reduces false-pass verdicts on incorrect DUTs. STG also helps identify errors in RTL generation benchmarks by exposing faulty benchmark testbenches. As a data curation engine, it is 11x faster than LLM-based filtering on a single CPU core with 127x less energy, and the resulting distilled models provide state-of-the-art performance in our multi-benchmark evaluation. As a test-time scaling oracle, it reduces node count by 14-47\%. Our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/AS-SiliconMind/siliconmind-v12.

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

Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing continues to be hindered by the loss of high-frequency details and the difficulty of accurate physical scattering modeling. To address these issues, we propose Fi-Gaussian, a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting network for single image dehazing. Unlike explicit rendering methods that rely on 3D point clouds, our method employs implicit Gaussian splatting to adaptively model the underlying distribution of clear images as a continuous representation in 2D feature space. The core of the network is a frequency-aware implicit Gaussian splatting module, which decouples low-frequency structural information and high-frequency texture information in the frequency domain and then performs adaptive Gaussian aggregation with complex-valued weights to recover fine details. In addition, a physics-driven scattering renormalization mechanism is introduced to estimate the transmission map and atmospheric light under the guidance of implicit Gaussian priors. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Fi-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually superior dehazed results, validating the effectiveness of implicit Gaussian splatting for low-level vision tasks.

19.
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.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins. After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos

Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Active Quantum Reservoir Engineering: Using a Qubit to Manipulate its Environment

arXiv:2505.16898v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum reservoir engineering leverages dissipative processes to achieve desired behavior, with applications ranging from entanglement generation to quantum error correction. Therein, a structured environment acts as an entropy sink for the system and no time-dependent control over the system is required. We develop a theoretical framework for active reservoir engineering, where time-dependent control over a quantum system is used to manipulate its environment. In this case, the system may act as an entropy sink for the environment. Our framwork captures the dynamical interplay between system and environment, and provides an intuitive picture of how finite-size effects and system-environment correlations allow for manipulating the environment by repeated initialization of the quantum system. We illustrate our results with two examples: a superconducting qubit coupled to an environment of two-level systems and a semiconducting quantum dot coupled to nuclear spins. In both scenarios, we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results, illustrating how active control can unlock new functionalities in open quantum systems.

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

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Atypical Decay Rates for Atypical Heights in Random Recursive Trees

arXiv:2604.20139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We establish the large deviation probabilities for the height of random recursive trees, revealing polynomial upper-tail decay and stretched-exponential lower-tail decay. Remarkably, the lower tail features an atypical prefactor that grows to infinity more slowly than any $n$-fold iterated logarithm.