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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

arXiv:2606.24242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $\Xi$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $\Xi$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $\Xi$ after the beam splitter mixing with $\Xi$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

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

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

arXiv:2606.18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories. Beyond static heuristic filtering, advanced data selection methods for LLM training largely follow two paradigms, each with fundamental limitations. Influence-based methods provide principled bi-level objectives but require intractable inverse-Hessian computations, while excess-loss methods are computationally efficient but rely on a static reference model that becomes misaligned with the evolving proxy model during training. We propose BLADE (Bi-Level Adaptive Data sElection), a Hessian-free framework for data selection. BLADE reformulates the bi-level optimization problem underlying influence-based methods as a penalized single-level objective via Lagrange multipliers, avoiding inverse-Hessian computation while revealing a principled connection to excess-loss based data selection. The resulting objective recovers an excess-loss form but replaces the static reference model with a dynamic one that stays synchronized with training. Theoretically, we prove that this penalized formulation guarantees first-order convergence. For efficient online batch selection, we instantiate BLADE as a memoryless randomized block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Extensive experiments show that BLADE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines, providing a practical recipe for LLM training.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Are Safety Guarantees in Neural Networks Safe? How to Compute Trustworthy Robustness Certifications

arXiv:2606.23858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A primary challenge in AI safety is the existence of adversarial examples – slightly distorted inputs that cause a neural network (NN) to misclassify. To mitigate this problem, recent research focuses on the computation of robustness certifications, which, for a given input, determine the largest distortion the input may receive without breaking the network's prediction. Robustness certifications can be interpreted as an axis-aligned hyper-rectangle (multi-dimensional intervals). Most existing approaches focus on maximizing the certification's volume, but recent intractability results prohibit the computation of volume-optimal certifications in reasonable time. We introduce the apothem measure and show how to compute apothem-optimal certifications in a linear number of calls to a NN verifier (oracle) w.r.t. the input domain's diameter. Moreover, we prove that we cannot have a volume-optimal, oracle-based algorithm, even if we discard the oracle costs. Also, we introduce dual certifications – an interval including all instances of a class – thus providing apothem-minimum upper bounds to a robustness certification. Further, we present the ParallelepipedoNN system, which we evaluate on the standard MNIST and Fashion MNIST benchmarks. A preliminary comparison with existing work on the same datasets reveals at least two-fold improvement w.r.t. the minimum edge length.

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

Dream at SemEval-2026 Task 13: SALSA for Single-Pass Machine-Generated Code Detection

Large language models have transformed code generation, raising concerns around authorship, assessment integrity, and software trust. SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask A operationalizes detection as binary classification over code snippets, with a particular emphasis on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization across unseen programming languages and application domains. We propose a SALSA-style formulation, Single-pass Autoregressive LLM Structured Classification, that maps each class to a dedicated output token and trains the model to emit a single-token label in a structured response. Rather than engineering hand-crafted features or decision rules, this formulation delegates the authorship decision to the model. To improve OOD robustness, we combine balanced sampling across languages with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and conservative training (low learning rate, single epoch) to avoid overfitting to the training domain. Our best system achieves OOD $F_1 = 0.789$ on the official leaderboard, substantially outperforming the CodeBERT baseline ($F_1 = 0.305$).

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

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

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

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

DINO-Med3D: Bridging Dimension and Domain Gaps in Volumetric Segmentation via Progressive Adaptation

Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

GF-DiT: Scheduling Parallelism for Diffusion Transformer Serving

arXiv:2606.13501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for image and video generation, creating growing demand for efficient DiT serving. Existing systems assign each request a fixed parallel configuration throughout its lifetime. However, DiT workloads exhibit substantial heterogeneity across requests, execution stages, and system conditions, making static parallelism inefficient and often leading to poor GPU utilization and degraded service quality. This paper argues that DiT serving should treat GPU parallelism as a first-class schedulable resource. We present GF-DiT, a policy-programmable runtime for elastic DiT serving that dynamically adapts the parallelism of running requests according to workload demands and service objectives. GF-DiT introduces an asynchronous execution abstraction that decomposes requests into independently schedulable trajectory tasks and enables online GPU reallocation. To make elastic parallelism practical, GF-DiT further proposes group-free collectives, a lightweight communication abstraction that supports low-overhead online formation and reconfiguration of arbitrary execution groups. We implement GF-DiT in vLLM-Omni and evaluate it on representative image and video diffusion workloads. Compared with fixed-pipeline execution with static parallelism, GF-DiT improves throughput by up to 6.01$\times$, reduces mean latency by up to 95%, lowers SLO violation rates by up to 90%, and reduces communication-group setup overhead from 778 ms to approximately 60 $\mu$s.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Characterizing Narrative Content in Web-scale LLM Pretraining Data

The narrative composition of web-scale LLM pretraining corpora remains largely unexplored even though narrative is a fundamental mode of human communication. We present the first fine-grained study of narrative features in Dolma, a 3-trillion-token open pretraining corpus. Drawing on narrative theory, we design a framework spanning three core narrative elements (agency, setting, and events) operationalized as 11 interpretable dimensions. After sampling and annotating a diverse set of 400 passages, we finetune and validate NarraBERT, a RoBERTa-based model for fine-grained narrative prediction. We apply NarraBERT to 3M passages, resulting in a new dataset, NarraDolma. We find (i) narrative structure is measurable at scale across extremely heterogeneous data, (ii) we uncover a continuous, multidimensional narrative structure underlying web text, and (iii) narrative qualities are unequally distributed across pretraining sources and topics in ways that current curation practices neither measure nor account for. Our framework, dataset, and analyses provide a foundation for understanding how narrative qualities are distributed in LLM pretraining data and for studying how data composition affects narrative reasoning tasks. We publicly release NarraDolma and NarraBERT.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Spectral Phase Diagram for Binary Few-Shot Classification: Intrinsic Dimensionality, Geometric Saturation, and Representational Diagnosis

作者:

arXiv:2606.24903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding when to stop collecting labeled examples is a fundamental but undertheorized problem in applied machine learning. The saturation index $S(K) = \operatorname{erank}(\widehat{\Sigma}_W^{(K)}) / K$ measures the ratio of the effective rank of the pooled within-class sample covariance to the shot count; we prove it falls below a threshold precisely when the covariance estimator is well-concentrated around the population covariance and the linear discriminant has stabilized. The index is computable in $O(d^3)$ time from support features alone, requiring no test labels or trained classifier. Evaluated across $N = 246$ doubling-pair observations from seventeen binary tasks and six datasets, sixteen of seventeen tasks have a positive within-task Spearman correlation between $S(K)$ and marginal accuracy gain (median $\rho = 0.811$). The pooled Spearman correlation is $\rho = 0.548$ ($p = 1.1 \times 10^{-20}$, $N = 246$). A three-phase diagram (exploration, transition, saturation) with mean marginal gains of $3.48\%$, $2.40\%$, and $0.82\%$ is supported by all pairwise significance tests ($p \leq 0.008$). As a binary stopping rule, the index achieves AUC $= 0.752$, providing meaningful probabilistic guidance for annotation decisions. Asymptotic effective rank and peak accuracy show no significant monotone relationship across tasks (Spearman $r_s = 0.380$, $p = 0.133$, $N = 17$). A small saturation index paired with low accuracy diagnoses representational inadequacy. All results are for binary classification with a fixed linear classifier; extensions to $N$-way settings and pretrained backbone representations are discussed as future work.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MoSE: Mixture of Slimmable Experts for Efficient and Adaptive Language Models

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale large language models efficiently by sparsely activating experts, but once an expert is selected, it is executed fully. Hence, the trade-off between accuracy and computation in an MoE model typically exhibits large discontinuities. We propose Mixture of Slimmable Experts (MoSE), an MoE architecture in which each expert has a nested, slimmable structure that can be executed at variable widths. This enables conditional computation not only over which experts are activated but also over how much of each expert is utilized. Consequently, a single pretrained MoSE model can support a more continuous spectrum of accuracy-compute trade-offs at inference time. We present a simple and stable training recipe for slimmable experts under sparse routing, combining multi-width training with standard MoE objectives. During inference, we explore strategies for runtime width determination, including a lightweight test-time training mechanism that learns how to map router confidence/probabilities to expert widths under a fixed budget. Experiments on GPT-style models, various routing regimes, zero-shot downstream reasoning benchmarks, and continual pre-training adaptation of DeepSeek model show that MoSE matches or improves standard MoE at full width and consistently shifts the compute-quality frontier toward lower inference FLOPs. The code can be found at: https://github.com/tnurbek/mose.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

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

An Adaptive Data cleaning Framework for Noisy Label Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks given large annotated datasets. In real-world applications, however, labels are often corrupted by ambiguity, human error, or dynamic environments. Over-parameterized DNNs easily memorize these noisy labels during training, degrading model accuracy and generalization. Existing data-cleaning and sample-selection strategies often rely on manually specified thresholds, prior knowledge of the noise ratio, or a single metric (either learning dynamics or geometric structure), making them unstable in complex data regimes. This paper proposes a self-adaptive data-cleaning framework that integrates local, global, and learning dynamics cues for robust noisy-label detection. Samples are mapped into a unified low-dimensional feature space through a modular feature concatenation paradigm. We provide two instantiations: a 2D metric integrating class-adaptive KNN-based local disagreement with k-means-based global centroid distance, and a 3D multi-metric that additionally incorporates a z-normalized score. Unlike conventional 1D Gaussian Mixture Models applied to a single scalar metric, our framework performs multi-metric clustering on the feature space to adaptively partition samples into clean-dominant and noise-dominant components without requiring manual thresholds or noise priors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and ImageNet-100 with 5% to 40% symmetric label noise show high recall across settings, including near-perfect recall (>=98%) on ImageNet-100 at 40% noise. Subsequent training yields accuracy gains across evaluated settings, especially under severe corruption on ImageNet-100. These findings suggest that multi-metric integration provides a threshold-free, practical, and low-tuning strategy for noisy label detection.

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

The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the largest-scale empirical analysis to date of training-free sparse attention, evaluating six methods across multiple model families and sizes, sequences up to 128K tokens, and sparsity levels up to 0.95 (i.e., $1/20$ attention budget) on nine diverse tasks. We first organise the rapidly evolving landscape of sparse attention methods into a taxonomy along four design axes. Our analysis then yields actionable insights: 1) sparse attention is effective: larger sparse models outperform smaller dense ones at equivalent cost, improving the Pareto frontier; 2) for the training-free methods we study, fine-grained per-query importance estimation during prefilling remains impractical-due to both the cost of estimation and the lack of sparse kernels that translate fine-grained sparsity into wall-clock gains-forcing a task-dependent choice between global-to-token and block-to-block selection. Instead, during decoding, token-to-page selection becomes feasible, enabling better generalisation and higher sparsity tolerance; 3) longer sequences tolerate higher sparsity, suggesting that fixed-budget methods in production are suboptimal. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for deploying sparse attention and methodological recommendations for future evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/PiotrNawrot/sparse-frontier.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A Global Health Quality Improvement Project: Enhancing Cervical Cancer Awareness and screening in Nigeria

Background Cervical cancer remains a significant global public health challenge, ranking as the fourth most common cancer among women worldwide. According to The World Health Organization (WHO) 604,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer globally in 2020, with over 342,000 deaths amongst this group [1]. Despite its high mortality, cervical cancer is largely preventable through early detection and vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes nearly all cases of cervical cancer [1,2] In Nigeria, it is the second most common cancer among women in Nigeria and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths, with low screening rates exacerbating late diagnoses and poor outcomes [1]. Despite global commitments to elimination with Pap smear screening and HPV vaccination, less than 10% of women in Nigeria have undergone screening due to misconceptions, stigma, and limited awareness. Educational interventions may improve awareness and promote screening behaviors. This global health quality improvement (QI) project aimed to enhance cervical cancer awareness and increase Pap smear uptake at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Clinic in Abuja, Nigeria. Methods In November 2024, we conducted a health education intervention at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through a structured educational session for male and female CBN staff members. The session focused on cervical cancer prevention, risk factors, and screening guidelines. Additionally, cervical cancer awareness was raised via email, social media, and electronic bulletin board. Participants completed pre and post-interventions surveys assessing cervical cancer knowledge across 10 key items and demographic characteristics. Pap smear uptake was assessed using the CBN clinic records for three months before and after the intervention. Institutional approval was obtained from CBN and external institutional review board approval was not required. Results 188 participants attended the health education session with 124 survey responses (70 pre-event, 54 post-event). Participants were mostly women aged 30-39. Post-intervention, eight of ten survey questions showed improved knowledge, with five demonstrating statistically significant gains: understanding Pap smear frequency (p

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Something from Nothing: Data Augmentation for Robust Severity Level Estimation of Dysarthric Speech

arXiv:2603.15988v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies. However, subjective evaluation is costly and difficult to scale, and the scarcity of labeled data limits robust objective modeling. To address this, we propose a three-stage framework that leverages unlabeled dysarthric speech and large-scale typical speech datasets to scale training. A teacher model first generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, followed by weakly supervised pretraining using a label-aware contrastive learning strategy that exposes the model to diverse speakers and acoustic conditions. The pretrained model is then fine-tuned for the downstream DSQA task. Experiments on five unseen datasets spanning multiple etiologies and languages demonstrate the robustness of our approach. Our Whisper-based baseline significantly outperforms SOTA DSQA predictors such as SpICE, and the full framework achieves an average SRCC of 0.761 across unseen test datasets.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CoVR-R:Reason-Aware Composed Video Retrieval

Composed Video Retrieval (CoVR) aims to find a target video given a reference video and a textual modification. Prior work assumes the modification text fully specifies the visual changes, overlooking after-effects and implicit consequences (e.g., motion, state transitions, viewpoint or duration cues) that emerge from the edit. We argue that successful CoVR requires reasoning about these after-effects. We introduce a reasoning-first, zero-shot approach that leverages large multimodal models to (i) infer causal and temporal consequences implied by the edit, and (ii) align the resulting reasoned queries to candidate videos without task-specific finetuning. To evaluate reasoning in CoVR, we also propose CoVR-Reason, a benchmark that pairs each (reference, edit, target) triplet with structured internal reasoning traces and challenging distractors that require predicting after-effects rather than keyword matching. Experiments show that our zero-shot method outperforms strong retrieval baselines on recall at K and particularly excels on implicit-effect subsets. Our automatic and human analysis confirm higher step consistency and effect factuality in our retrieved results. Our findings show that incorporating reasoning into general-purpose multimodal models enables effective CoVR by explicitly accounting for causal and temporal after-effects. This reduces dependence on task-specific supervision, improves generalization to challenging implicit-effect cases, and enhances interpretability of retrieval outcomes. These results point toward a scalable and principled framework for explainable video search. The model, code, and benchmark are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/CoVR-R.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

3D Masked Autoencoders are Robust Learners of Volumetric and Multimodal Cellular Representations for Microscopy

Self-supervised learning in fluorescence microscopy often relies on 2D projections, despite the inherently three-dimensional nature of cells. We present a systematic comparison of 2D and 3D masked autoencoders (MAE-2D vs. MAE-3D) on volumetric microscopy data. Under matched architectures and training protocols, MAE-3D consistently outperforms 2D max-projection and slice-based variants on downstream single-cell tasks. We further align visual representations with a pretrained protein language model (ESM2) and show that cross-modal supervision yields larger gains for volumetric models. Channel cross-attention and frequency-domain regularization are critical for leveraging 3D spatial context. On a protein–protein interaction task, MAE-3D achieves a ROC–AUC of 0.865, outperforming prior methods by up to +0.025. For protein localization, our best 3D model attains state-of-the-art AUC$_{micro}$ (0.952) and F1$_{micro}$ (0.742), improving over previous approaches by +0.003 and +0.010 absolute, respectively. Overall, these results demonstrate the advantages of native 3D modeling and multimodal alignment for representation learning in single-cell microscopy.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum metrology via partial quantum error correction

arXiv:2605.08341v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a method for error-corrected quantum metrology where only partial quantum error correction (QEC) is needed to suppress local noise and maintain the probe states' super-standard-quantum-limit (super-SQL) sensing performance. This stands in contrast to the existing QEC-assisted sensing schemes in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 080801 (2014) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150802 (2014), where a probe state is encoded into the logical subspace of a quantum code and error correction involves measurements on all checks of the code. Here, we encode the probe states into superpositions of energetically different states of the underlying quantum code. For our probe states, error correction using a subset of checks is enough to suppress noise both before and after phase imprinting. We analyze the tradeoff in noise suppression. For noise parallel to our phase imprinter of weight $l$, we achieve a suppression of $p^\delta$ where $p$ is the noise strength and $\delta = \lfloor (l+1)/2 \rfloor$. We propose an adaptive imprinter weight increasing strategy to maintain super-SQL performance as we scale up the system. In all our examples, checks and phase imprinters are chosen to be local operators avoiding non-local connectivity.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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

How Complexity Contributes to Learning Opacity in Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.24953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning (ML) algorithms are known to be opaque. We do not know the reasons for their predictions. The learning process leading to the prediction function is also opaque. We do not fully understand the time evolution of the weight values of neural nets (NN) and related dynamical phenomena. While prediction opacity is widely studied, learning opacity remains largely underexplored. This article studies learning opacity trough the lens of complex dynamical systems. We argue that NN learning is essentially a complex system and that learning opacity is due to dynamical complexity and the epistemological challenges that arise from it. We identify three key properties of training complexity – sensitivity to weight initialization, feedback in gradient based optimization, and sensitivity to the training data – and show how each contributes to learning opacity. As these properties are fundamental to the learning process damping or eliminating them would fundamentally alter how ML systems learn. Some sources of opacity in ML may hence be irreducible.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai