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

Graphical-Probabilistic Modeling of Generative Flows in LLM-Native Software Systems

arXiv:2606.15943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering LLM-native software remains a challenging and immature field. Current practice is largely exploratory, relying on experimentation and heuristic techniques such as prompting and context engineering. These, however, are low-level and lack the principled structure needed to support design-level reasoning or analysis. In contrast, traditional software engineering leverages modularity and abstraction to communicate and analyze system behavior. To bring similar rigor to LLM-native development, we propose methods for documenting generative flows and for stating properties of LLM-based software designs. Such methods must account for the stochastic, prompt-dependent behavior of large language models while remaining expressive enough to capture emergent phenomena. Our initial approach is based on graphical probabilistic models, tailored to capture phenomena characteristic of LLM-native systems. This framework – what we term Generation Networks – aims to provide a foundation for principled reasoning about generative interactions and system-level properties in LLM-centric software architectures.

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

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built on within-question sampling and self-evaluation. Operad theory, the formalism for systems built by iterated substitution, suggests a complementary diagnostic: a model's direct answer to a compositional query should agree with the answer it produces by composing a stated decomposition of the same query. We instantiate this idea as operadic consistency (OC), a per-question signal. Across twelve instruction-tuned LLMs (4B to 671B parameters, open-weights and closed-source) on four multi-hop QA datasets, OC is strongly correlated with accuracy on every dataset (Pearson $r \in [0.86, 0.94]$, all $p \leq 0.0004$), and is the only signal we evaluate with $r \geq 0.85$ uniformly across all four datasets. Chain-of-thought self-consistency (CoT-SC; Wang et al., 2023) matches OC on HotpotQA and DROP ($r = 0.93, 0.87$) but drops to $r \approx 0.45$ on MuSiQue and StrategyQA. At the per-question level, OC contributes information beyond CoT-SC and semantic entropy on every dataset (cluster-robust $p \leq 10^{-16}$ for the OC coefficient), and the conclusion is robust to additionally controlling for constructed decomposition-aware baselines ($p \leq 10^{-13}$). The same signal yields selective-prediction improvements (accuracy at fixed coverage) over a tuned CoT-SC baseline at the equal-cost $K = 3$ budget (AUARC lifts of +0.086 to +0.096 and AUROC lifts of +0.092 to +0.164; 95% CIs exclude zero on every cell). On five frontier thinking models, where the decomposition is extracted from the model's own chain of thought, the same equal-cost comparison gives positive selective-prediction point-estimate lift on all 16 (dataset, budget, metric) cells tested, with 95% CIs excluding zero on 12 of the 16.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

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

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.

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

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

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

System Report for CCL25-Eval Task 5: New Dataset and LoRA-Fine-Tuned Qwen2.5

作者:

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising progress in the fields of classical Chinese translation and the generation of classical poetry. However, domain-specific research on precise translation and affective-semantic understanding of classical poetry remains limited. The main challenge is that most studies treat the poetic appreciation task as a general-domain problem, neglecting the distinctive features of poetic appreciation, while high-quality and domain-specific datasets are extremely limited. To address this limitation, we decompose the task into three subtasks: term interpretation, semantic interpretation, and emotional inference. Based on multiple open-source datasets, we perform data cleansing and alignment to construct the Classical Chinese Poetry Instruction Pair Dataset (CCPoetry-49K), which comprises 49,404 high-quality instruction-response pairs explicitly optimized for this domain. We then propose a domain-specialized LLM, called PoetryQwen, by applying Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the Qwen2.5-14B model. Experimental results on the CCL25-Eval Task 5 benchmark demonstrate that PoetryQwen achieves a score of 0.757, representing a 9.7% improvement over the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct baseline (0.690). These findings clearly indicate that PoetryQwen significantly enhances performance in precise translation and emotional understanding of classical poetry. We present new dataset and methodological considerations intended to support the domain-specific optimization of LLMs.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

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

Model Collapse Is Not a Bug but a Feature in Machine Unlearning for LLMs

arXiv:2507.04219v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current unlearning methods for LLMs optimize on the private information they seek to remove by incorporating it into their fine-tuning data. We argue this not only risks reinforcing exposure to sensitive data, but also fundamentally contradicts the principle of minimizing its use. As a remedy, we propose a novel unlearning method-Partial Model Collapse (PMC), which does not require unlearning targets in the unlearning objective. Our approach is inspired by recent observations that training generative models on their own generations leads to distribution collapse, effectively removing information from model outputs. Our central insight is that model collapse can be leveraged for machine unlearning by deliberately triggering it for data we aim to remove. We theoretically analyze that our approach converges to the desired outcome, i.e. the model unlearns the data targeted for removal. We empirically demonstrate that PMC overcomes four key limitations of existing unlearning methods that explicitly optimize on unlearning targets, and more effectively removes private information from model outputs while preserving general model utility. Overall, our contributions represent an important step toward more comprehensive unlearning that better aligns with real-world privacy constraints. Code available at https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/daml/partial-model-collapse/.

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

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Land-Use Image Classification

In the present article, an improved Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework has been proposed for efficient compression of deep convolutional neural networks for land-use image classification task. Motivated by the need to achieve competitive classification accuracy while reducing computational complexity, a teacher-student learning paradigm is adopted in which a VGG16 network transfers knowledge to a lightweight MobileNetV2 model. The proposed framework integrates hard supervision from ground truth labels with a soft supervision strategy that combines Kullback-Leibler divergence and Cosine Similarity losses. Experiments conducted on three land-use datasets show that the proposed KD-based method yields improved performance, and achieves an accuracy of 99.04%, outperforming both baseline student training and single-loss distillation approaches, while retaining substantial model compression.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

MAPS: A Novel Multi-Axial Projective Sphere for Geometrically Visualizing Higher d-Valued Quantum State-Space of Qudits

arXiv:2606.15801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizing the d-valued quantum state-space of quantum systems serves as a foundational pillar for the scientific research and practical applications in quantum computing and information science, where d >= 2. The 2-valued quantum states of a qubit are elegantly visualized on the three-dimensional Bloch sphere. In contrast, expanding this geometrical paradigm to visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit (d >= 3), e.g., a qutrit (d=3), ququadit (d=4), and quintit (d=5), leads to severe structural and topological complexities. This paper introduces a new generalized three-dimensional framework to effectively visualize higher d-valued quantum states of a qudit, in the aspects of ease of illustration, structural simplicity, and natural representation for researchers and engineers. We called this new framework the "multi-axial projective sphere (MAPS)", which consists of n projectional intersecting spatial axes, where d-1

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Eyring-Kramers asymptotics for infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems

arXiv:2606.16083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study small-noise asymptotics for a class of reversible stochastic evolution equations in infinite dimensions. The dynamics are of the form \[ dX_t=-A\nabla F(X_t)\,dt+\sqrt{2\beta^{-1}A}\,dW_t, \] where $F$ is a regular multi-well potential, $A$ is a selfadjoint mobility operator, $W$ is a cylindrical Brownian motion and $\beta\gg 1$ is the inverse noise strength. The invariant measure is a Gibbs perturbation of a Gaussian reference measure, and the resulting framework covers, in particular, the stochastic Allen-Cahn and stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equations on bounded intervals. In the double-well case, we derive a sharp asymptotic formula for the first nonzero eigenvalue of the generator. This gives an infinite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers law for the spectral gap, with exponential rate determined by the communication height and leading prefactor determined by the local quadratic behavior at the relevant minima and saddle points. Our approach provides a general strategy for lifting finite-dimensional Eyring-Kramers analysis to infinite-dimensional stochastic gradient systems.

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

MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling

We present MaxProof, a population-level test-time scaling framework for competition-level mathematical proof in the MiniMax-M3 series. M3 first trains three proof-oriented capabilities – proof generation, proof verification, and critique-conditioned proof repair – using a defense-in-depth generative verifier engineered for low false-positive rate. These capabilities are merged into a single released M3 model. At test time, MaxProof treats the model as a generator, verifier, refiner, and ranker, searches over a population of candidate proofs, and returns one final proof through tournament selection. With MaxProof test-time scaling, the M3 model reaches 35/42 on IMO 2025 and 36/42 on USAMO 2026, exceeding the human gold-medal threshold on both.

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

Phys4D: Fine-Grained Physics-Consistent 4D Modeling from Video Diffusion

Recent video diffusion models have achieved impressive capabilities as large-scale generative world models. However, these models often struggle with fine-grained physical consistency, exhibiting physically implausible dynamics over time. In this work, we present Phys4D, a pipeline for learning physics-consistent 4D world representations from video diffusion models. Phys4D adopts a three-stage training paradigm that progressively lifts appearance-driven video diffusion models into physics-consistent 4D world representations. We first bootstrap robust geometry and motion representations through large-scale pseudo-supervised pretraining, establishing a foundation for 4D scene modeling. We then perform physics-grounded supervised fine-tuning using simulation-generated data, enforcing temporally consistent 4D dynamics. Finally, we apply simulation-grounded reinforcement learning to correct residual physical violations that are difficult to capture through explicit supervision. To evaluate fine-grained physical consistency beyond appearance-based metrics, we introduce a set of 4D world consistency evaluation that probe geometric coherence, motion stability, and long-horizon physical plausibility. Experimental results demonstrate that Phys4D substantially improves fine-grained spatiotemporal and physical consistency compared to appearance-driven baselines, while maintaining strong generative performance. Our project page is available at https://sensational-brioche-7657e7.netlify.app/

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

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

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Poor Coding Practices in TensorFlow and Keras Applications: A Study on Resource Leaks and Carbon Emissions

arXiv:2606.19799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiency and sustainability are critical considerations in the development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications. Among the factors influencing sustainability, resource leaks in ML code can introduce hidden inefficiencies that elevate energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Despite this, empirical evidence quantifying their environmental impact remains limited. This emerging results paper presents an initial empirical investigation of two common resource-leak smells, namely Improper Model Reuse (IMR) and Unreleased Tensor References (UTR), and their impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions in TensorFlow and Keras workloads. Controlled experiments were conducted for each smell by executing identical training tasks while comparing against a smell-free baseline. Our preliminary results show that both smells consistently increase estimated electricity usage and carbon emissions. IMR and UTR increased electricity consumption by approximately 32% and 46%, respectively, with proportional increases in CO2 emissions. Paired statistical tests indicate that these differences are systematic and statistically significant, providing initial empirical evidence that resource-leak smells may degrade ML energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. These findings suggest that resource-leak smells pose measurable risks to both software quality and sustainability, emphasizing the importance of integrating resource-lifecycle management and energy-efficiency considerations into ML development.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Stable size-biasing and the positive scale-mixture order of generalized Gaussian laws

arXiv:2606.18458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $X_r\sim N_r(0,1)$ be the centered unit-scale generalized Gaussian random variable with density proportional to $\exp(-|x|^r/2)$. We prove that, for $p,q>0$, there exists a strictly positive random variable $V$, independent of $X_q$, such that $X_p\stackrel{d}{=}VX_q$ if and only if $p\le q$. Moreover, the law of $V$ is unique. For $pq$, the required Mellin quotient, viewed as the candidate characteristic function of $\log V$, is unbounded by Stirling's formula, and hence cannot be a characteristic function. The factor laws form a multiplicative cocycle, $V_{p,r}\stackrel{d}{=}V_{p,q}V_{q,r}$, for $p\le q\le r$, where the factors on the right-hand side are independent copies. Thus the Mellin quotient isolated by Dytso, Bustin, Poor and Shamai is realized constructively throughout the $p

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

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Silhouette-Guided Animal Art

Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.

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

AURA: Active-Response Attribution under Treatment Ambiguity in Bacterial Cytological Profiling

When a bacterial sample is exposed to several antibiotics, not every applied drug necessarily acts: if the organism is resistant to one of them, that drug leaves no morphological trace. The clinically meaningful quantity is therefore not which antibiotics were applied, but which ones were active. We show that these two are sharply decoupled in real E. coli microscopy - naively assuming the applied combination equals the active one is correct only about 37% of the time - yet existing computational tools are ill-suited to recovering the active set. Forward perturbation models such as scGen, CPA, and IMPA are designed to predict appearance from treatment, not the reverse, and inverting them degrades sharply; discriminative image classifiers tend to memorise strain- and batch-specific texture and fail to transfer across experimental replicates. We introduce AURA, which reframes the task as constrained, energy-based inverse attribution. Its central inductive bias is that the active set must be a subset of the applied set; this collapses the candidate space and lets AURA infer the active subset of applied antibiotics by decomposing residual morphology into antibiotic response atoms and selecting the subset with the lowest reconstruction energy, using no strain label at test time. AURA-E adds evidence-aware abstention, withholding a prediction when candidate explanations remain near-equally plausible. On cross-replicate transfer in an E. coli cytological profiling dataset, AURA recovers the active antibiotic combination with 95.47% exact-match accuracy.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Fast Nonparametric Conditional Independence Testing via Two-Stage Regression

arXiv:2606.18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships. We introduce BLITZ (Broad-to-Local Independence Testing via residualiZation), a nonparametric conditional independence test designed to run well under a second while maintaining the accuracy needed for the thousands of queries performed by constraint-based causal discovery algorithms. BLITZ first removes broad smooth dependence on the conditioning set using low-order polynomial regression, then applies a small nonlinear feature map and residualizes those features with shallow tree regressions. The resulting statistic tests residual cross-covariance, with a moment-matched chi-square approximation to the null distribution. We show theoretically that the two-stage design reduces the effective complexity faced by the tree residualizers, allowing shallow trees to control residual conditional-mean bias while avoiding excessive overfitting. In simulations, BLITZ provides better null calibration than fast kernel, random-feature, and regression-based competitors while remaining among the fastest methods tested. In causal discovery experiments on synthetic graphs and flow-cytometry data, BLITZ yields more reliable endpoint orientations among retained adjacencies and competitive structural recovery. These results suggest that broad-to-local residualization is a practical route to calibrated, scalable nonparametric conditional independence testing for causal discovery.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

What does measuring one qubit reveal about another? $K$-networks as a directed diagnostic for quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-qubit circuit states are hard to inspect directly, so they are often summarized by pairwise graph weights. Common pairwise weights report symmetric correlations, while many circuit questions are directed and basis-specific: if qubit $i$ is measured in a given basis, how strongly does the outcome reshape the conditional state of qubit $j$? We define $K_{i\to j}$, a directed, basis-conditioned edge weight for this question. It is large when the two measurement outcomes occur with comparable probability and leave qubit $j$ in clearly different conditional states; it is zero when the source outcome is deterministic or the target states are indistinguishable. The scalar uses standard binary-ensemble distinguishability; the paper's contribution is to turn this conditional comparison into a directed network layer for circuit states. The resulting networks are computable from two-qubit reduced density matrices. They are diagnostic (not entanglement measures): for pure two-qubit states $K$ reduces to the tangle $C^2$ (squared concurrence)[WoottersConcurrence,CKWTangle], while separable mixed states can reach $K=1$. Examples on teleportation, Grover, QAOA, and random circuit families show the intended use: $K$-networks map feed-forward, phase, and interaction-graph structure that symmetric or computational-basis summaries can leave weak or absent.