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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nonadiabatic Self-Healing of Trotter Errors in Digitized Counterdiabatic Dynamics

arXiv:2512.22636v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trotter errors in digitized quantum dynamics arise from approximating time-ordered evolution under noncommuting Hamiltonian terms with a product formula. In the adiabatic regime, such errors are known to exhibit long-time self-healing [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 060602 (2023)], where discretization effects are effectively suppressed. Here we show that self-healing persists at finite evolution times once nonadiabatic errors induced by finite-speed ramps are compensated. Using counterdiabatic driving to cancel diabatic transitions and isolate discretization effects, we study both noninteracting and interacting spin models and characterize the finite-time scaling with the Trotter steps and the total evolution time. In the instantaneous eigenbasis of the driven Hamiltonian, the leading digital error maps to an effective harmonic perturbation whose dominant Fourier component yields an analytic upper bound on the finite-time Trotter error and reveals the phase-cancellation mechanism underlying self-healing. Our results establish finite-time self-healing as a generic feature of digitized counterdiabatic protocols, clarify its mechanism beyond the long-time adiabatic limit, and provide practical guidance for high-fidelity state preparation on gate-based quantum processors.

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

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

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

Experimental quantum state learning with pairs of photons

arXiv:2606.16932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tomography allows one to estimate the density matrix describing the state an ensemble of quantum systems are prepared in (for example, polarization tomography determines the polarization state of a beam of identically prepared photons). In general, it is not possible to uniquely decompose the density matrix into its pure state components. Agarwal et al. proposed a protocol which, for a mixture composed of any two pure states of a qubit (with arbitrary probabilities), allows an observer to infer not only the density matrix but the identity of those specific pure states and their weights - the additional requirement being that the qubits arrive in pairs, where both qubits in each pair are in the same state. We experimentally demonstrate this learning-from-pairs concept using photons in the polarization degree of freedom. We use tomography to measure a sequence of single photons and make use of their time-of-arrival information to 'pair up' the photons after the measurement. From here we are able to infer the photons' polarization states and their respective probabilities, and we demonstrate this for various different choices of polarization states and ratios. Finally, we investigate our ability to discriminate between two equal mixtures of distinct pairs of orthogonal polarization states. We find that on the order of approx. 10e4 photons is typically enough to achieve tomography fidelities of approximately 0.9999. This is sufficient to discriminate between two different preparations of the same mixed state, differing by angles of less than 5 degrees between the pure states used in the two preparations.

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

BBR-Net: Boundary-Balanced Replay for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

Continual learning for medical image segmentation remains challenging under domain shift because replay-based methods often preserve appearance information without explicitly modeling anatomical structure. This study investigates whether structural consistency governs knowledge retention in continual cardiac ultrasound segmentation. We propose the Boundary-Balanced Replay Network (BBR-Net), which selects replay samples using boundary-aware priority and class balance to preserve anatomically informative regions. The method is evaluated on CAMUS and CardiacNet under forward (CAMUS to CardiacNet) and reverse (CardiacNet to CAMUS) task orders. In the forward setting, BBR-Net retains source-task performance close to an offline joint-training reference, while markedly reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving competitive target-task adaptation. Ablation results show that boundary-aware prioritization contributes to retention and improves the balance between source-task preservation and target-task adaptation when combined with class-aware sampling. In contrast, the reverse setting reveals that structure-aware replay fails when initial representations are learned from noisy and structurally inconsistent data. To isolate this effect, we conduct a controlled structural perturbation analysis by progressively corrupting source-task boundaries while keeping the dataset, architecture, and training protocol fixed. Forgetting increases consistently as structural reliability decreases, suggesting that replay effectiveness is strongly influenced by the quality of stored structural information, rather than by memory capacity alone. These findings indicate that preserving anatomical structure under domain shift is a central factor in continual medical image segmentation, and that replay mechanisms should account for structural reliability to support robust knowledge retention.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Boosting Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization

作者:

arXiv:2606.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3\% and 4.4\% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.

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

Suppressing Intrinsic Spin-Phonon Errors in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2606.15518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trapped-ion quantum simulators realize programmable spin models through phonon-mediated interactions. For Hamiltonians with noncommuting terms, however, the same phonon bus generates intrinsic spin-phonon errors that strongly distort the target dynamics. Because these errors are governed by the full time history of the spin-dependent phonon motion, they survive standard loop-closing control and limit simulation accuracy. Using a sequence of frame transformations, we isolate the residual error dynamics and show that this intrinsic error can be strongly suppressed while preserving programmable Ising couplings. Full spin-boson simulations of multi-ion chains demonstrate orders-of-magnitude lower error than both constant-drive and conventional loop-closing protocols. These results remove a central precision barrier in trapped-ion analog quantum simulation and enable accurate programmable simulation of noncommuting many-body Hamiltonians and dynamical protocols.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tunneling Dynamics and Time Delay in Electron Transport through Time-Dependent Barriers with Finite-Bandwidth Reservoirs

arXiv:2507.20649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a model system consisting of a tunneling barrier driven by an external harmonic field and coupled to two leads with finite bandwidth. Avoiding Floquet expansions, we derive simple expressions for the time-dependent tunneling current in the adiabatic regime. Our approach relates the barrier modulation to a measurable time delay in the steady-state periodic current. It provides a physically consistent definition of the tunneling time inside the barrier by subtracting the time delay associated with the leads from the total time delay. We find that the tunneling time always vanishes for wide/high barriers. Remarkably, the time delay persists even when the barrier becomes static, i.e., in the limit where the modulation frequency vanishes. This indicates that the time delay obtained through the introduction of an external periodic perturbation actually reflects an intrinsic property of the tunneling dynamics, rather than an effect of the external drive or of a particular system. We apply our results to the analysis of tunneling times in optical experiments and find good agreement with the experimental data.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

On the Position Bias of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.22600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves the learning efficiency of standard reinforcement learning through dense, token-level supervision from teachers. In the standard KL objective of OPD, token-level losses are uniformly averaged, implying equal weights for all tokens. However, we discover that not all tokens are created equal: as student rollouts grow longer, they deviate further from the teacher's distribution, leading to degraded supervision quality at later positions. As a result, OPD using only the first 30% of tokens can perform comparably to using all tokens, whereas OPD using only the last 30% of tokens barely learns anything. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of this issue through the lens of constrained optimization. Based on these insights, we derive Importance-Weighted On-Policy Distillation (IW-OPD), in which the weight assigned to each token depends on the accumulated discrepancy between the student's and teacher's distributions, naturally upweighting earlier tokens and downweighting later ones with larger deviations. We show that IW-OPD converges significantly faster than OPD, with better learning efficiency, and achieves better final performance than standard OPD in both same-size and cross-scale settings, improving performance up to 6.9 points on AIME-2025.

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

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When does dissipation help neural surrogates learn open quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dissipation is usually viewed as an obstacle to predicting quantum dynamics, yet it can also contract trajectories toward steady states and thereby suppress accumulated prediction errors, leaving it unclear whether dissipation ultimately helps or hinders the learnability of open quantum dynamics. We investigate this question using Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) surrogates for open Heisenberg XYZ spin chains. Closed-system learnability deteriorates rapidly with system size, culminating in a static-prediction collapse at four qubits; dissipation reverses this trend, creating a broad high-fidelity regime at intermediate system sizes, while at four qubits a fidelity-aware objective recovers learnable rollout structure that is absent under closed-system training. Comparison against static and steady-state baselines reveals that dissipation improves performance through two fundamentally different mechanisms: at weak-to-moderate dissipation the surrogate captures nontrivial transient dynamics and substantially outperforms trivial predictors, whereas at stronger damping high fidelity increasingly reflects trajectory simplification toward the steady state rather than improved learned dynamics. These results show that dissipation can enhance the learnability of open quantum dynamics, but that fidelity alone is insufficient to distinguish genuine dynamical learning from steady-state trivialization: dissipative contraction and trajectory simplification are distinct effects that peak in different regimes and should be disentangled when evaluating learned quantum-dynamical surrogates.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

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

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

REFLEX: Reflective Evolution from LLM Experience

作者:

Large multimodal language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for guiding evolutionary search toward interpretable programmatic policies. However, existing frameworks rely on a monolithic model call to simultaneously interpret visual behavioral evidence and synthesize corrective code. This diagnosis-repair entanglement creates an opaque feedback loop, obscuring the rationale behind mutations and preventing the retention of algorithmic insights across independent runs. To achieve auditable and efficient policy search, we argue that visual diagnosis must be structurally decoupled from code generation. We present REFLEX, a train-free evolutionary framework that operationalizes this decoupling. In REFLEX, a vision-enabled Critic first distills task-specific behavioral evidence into structured, auditable diagnoses. Subsequently, a text-optimized Actor synthesizes child policies using these diagnoses alongside a persistent, self-evolving Skill Memory of reusable code snippets. This architecture not only provides transparent mutation traces but also enables cross-run programmatic knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations across control benchmarks (Lunar Lander, Acrobot, Pendulum) and a 36-dimensional antenna array synthesis task demonstrate exceptional sample efficiency. Notably, REFLEX solves Acrobot and Pendulum in under 10 LLM calls and reaches a best Normalized Weighted Score of 1.092 on Lunar Lander, achieving highly competitive final performance while significantly accelerating the early-stage discovery of transparent policies.

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

LLM Judges Have Dark Current: A Psychometric Datasheet for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

LLM-as-a-judge systems are now routinely used for open-ended model evaluation, where human preference annotation is costly, slow, and difficult to reproduce. Yet these judges are often reported as scalar accuracy, win-rate, or agreement devices. We argue that a judge should instead be reported as a measurement instrument. We introduce a Judge Datasheet protocol that measures dark current under true-vacuum inputs, stable cross-sensitivity to same-quality surface variation, positional false preference, target sensitivity on a controlled quality ladder, and the criterion or operating point induced by tie instructions. The direction-stability decomposition reveals that apparent Delta0 preference can be stable surface response or disguised position bias. In a three-judge open-weight case study, Llama-3.1-8B shows high dark current and presentation-conflicted Delta0 behavior, Qwen2.5-14B is vacuum-clean and target-sensitive but mixes stable and positional over-discrimination, and Qwen2.5-32B is vacuum-clean with low stable cross-sensitivity and low positional false preference. A strict tie criterion eliminates Qwen32B Delta0 false preference but absorbs marginal Delta1 target signals into ties while preserving Delta5 sensitivity. The results show that prompting moves the criterion, not the resolution. We do not claim that the downstream mechanism hypothesis that motivated this work is confirmed; the contribution is a metrological protocol for measuring the measuring device before downstream claims are made.

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

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

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

The Hidden Cost of Approximation in Online Mirror Descent

arXiv:2511.22283v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which, oftentimes, can be solved only approximately, leading to an inexact version of the algorithm. Nonetheless, existing OMD analyses typically assume an idealized error free setting, thereby limiting our understanding of performance guarantees that should be expected in practice. In this work we initiate a systematic study into inexact OMD, and uncover an intricate relation between regularizer smoothness and robustness to approximation errors. When the regularizer is uniformly smooth, we establish a tight bound on the excess regret due to errors. Then, for barrier regularizers over the simplex and its subsets, we identify a sharp separation: negative entropy requires exponentially small errors to avoid linear regret, whereas log-barrier and Tsallis regularizers remain robust even when the errors are only polynomial. Finally, we show that when the losses are stochastic and the domain is the simplex, negative entropy regains robustness-but this property does not extend to all subsets, where exponentially small errors are again necessary to avoid suboptimal regret.

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

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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

A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models for PTSD Severity Estimation: The Role of Contextual Knowledge and Modeling Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in a zero-shot (generative) fashion to assess mental health conditions, yet we have limited knowledge on what factors affect their accuracy. In this study, we use a clinical dataset of natural language narratives and self-reported PTSD severity scores from 1,437 individuals to comprehensively evaluate the performance of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs. To understand the factors affecting model's assessment accuracy, we systematically varied (i) contextual knowledge prompted to the models like subscale definitions, distribution summary, and interview questions, and (ii) modeling strategies including zero-shot vs few shot, amount of reasoning effort, model sizes, structured subscales vs direct scalar prediction, output rescaling and nine ensemble methods. Our findings indicate that (a) LLMs are most accurate when provided with detailed construct definitions and context of the narrative, even exceeding human raters agreement with self-reported scores; (b) increased reasoning effort leads to better estimation accuracy; (c) performance of open-weight models (Llama, DeepSeek) plateaus beyond 70B parameters while closed-weight (gpt-o3-mini, gpt-5) alternatives improve with newer generations; and (d) best performance is achieved when ensembling a supervised model with the zero-shot LLMs. Beyond agreement with self-reports, LLMs' estimates discriminated PTSD severity from depression, anxiety, and alcohol use, and prospectively predicted future mental healthcare expenditure. Together, these results suggest that contextual knowledge and modeling strategies meaningfully affect accuracy and clinical utility of LLM-based assessments of PTSD severity.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis

The origin of eukaryotes remains a central enigma in biology1. Continuing debates agree on the pivotal role of a symbiosis between an alphaproteobacterium and an Asgard archaeon2,3. However, the nature, timing and contributions of other potential bacterial partners4–6 and the role of interactions with viruses7–9 remain contentious. To address these questions, we used advanced phylogenomic approaches and comprehensive datasets spanning the known diversity of cellular life and viruses. Our analysis provided a revised reconstruction of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) proteome, in which we traced the phylogenetic origin of each protein family. We found compelling evidence for multiple waves of horizontal gene transfer from diverse bacterial donors, with some likely to have preceded mitochondrial endosymbiosis. We inferred plausible traits of the major donors and their functional contributions to the LECA. Our findings support a contribution of horizontal gene transfers to shaping the proteomes of pre-LECA ancestors and suggest a facilitating role of Nucleocytoviricota viruses. Taken together, our results suggest that ancient eukaryotes may have originated within complex microbial ecosystems through a succession of diverse associations that left a footprint of horizontally transferred genes. Phylogenomic reconstruction of the proteome of the last eukaryotic common ancestor sheds light on the origin of eukaryotes, indicating an important role of horizontal transfer of genes from diverse bacterial and viral donors.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

arXiv:2606.13604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

ConTex: Reformulating Counterfactual Generation For Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-making with deep learning-based time series forecasting requires not only accurate predictions but also actionable insights. However, current architectures do not inherently provide such information. Specifically, guidance is needed on how current conditions must be modified to shift from a predicted outcome to a desired future scenario. Counterfactual explanations provide a natural framework for this task, as they represent minimal input changes that alter the model's prediction, indicating when and how intervention is required. Existing approaches rely on instance-wise optimization, leading to inconsistency across instances, high computational costs, and limited applicability in real-time settings. To address these limitations, we reformulate counterfactual generation for time series forecasting as the problem of learning a globally consistent intervention strategy, allowing counterfactuals to be generated through a single shared function. We propose Counterfactual Time Series Explanations (ConTex), a model-agnostic, decomposed architecture comprising a temporal context encoder and a conditional encoder, followed by two heads that capture interventions in terms of temporal relevance and modification strength. This structure overcomes the instability and inconsistency of instance-based approaches by producing targeted, interpretable interventions across time and feature dimensions in a single forward pass, making it suitable for real-time applications. Across multiple forecasting architectures and benchmark datasets, ConTex achieves state-of-the-art validity while generating sparse counterfactuals that minimize the number of necessary interventions. Additionally, our approach reduces computational cost by at least 12-36x compared to instance-wise generation and supports real-time inference at approximately 0.007 seconds.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization

Anonymizing human-centric video data is an understudied problem. Prior anonymization techniques either blur or redact pixels at the cost of realism and downstream utility, or generate frame-by-frame at the cost of temporal coherence. We introduce ReGenHuman, the first full-body video anonymization pipeline that is simultaneously realistic, temporally consistent, and anonymous by construction. Contrary to past approaches which redact or edit the inputs directly, we propose a regenerate, don't edit paradigm. Our approach composites 2D pose, segmentation, and monocular depth into two complementary conditioning streams - StructAll and StructHuman, which are used to fine-tune a video-to-video diffusion backbone on in-the-wild human videos, synthesizing the human regions entirely from identity-free structural cues. We evaluate our model on privacy, quality, and utility, and show that our ReGenHuman achieves the best tradeoff across all three axes against current baselines. We further show that our anonymized videos remain effective for downstream tasks, including video question answering.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TAHOE: Text-to-SQL with Automated Hint Optimization from Experience

arXiv:2606.12387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized database access through Text-to-SQL, but moving from prototypes to production remains difficult. Real deployments must handle strict SQL dialects, massive schemas, and evolving user preferences, while supervised fine-tuning is costly and rigid and agentic test-time scaling is expensive. We present Tahoe, a system that treats prompt optimization as a dynamic data management problem. Tahoe uses an error-driven hint learning pipeline across Development and Deployment to consolidate debugging traces into a structured Hint Bank. Compiler feedback is distilled into reusable Syntax Hints for dialect-specific rules, while execution and user feedback are converted into Semantic Hints for schema- and user-specific logic. Tahoe further introduces a Strategy Layer that models conflicting user intents as competing strategies under shared natural-language triggers, with recency signals and post-learning attribution statistics that summarize empirical success, harm, inertness, and support. At inference time, Tahoe retrieves relevant hints and guides the LLM through Logic Planning followed by SQL Synthesis. We implement and evaluate the development-phase workflow, leaving deployment-time human-feedback updates for future work. On Spider 2.0-Snow, Tahoe substantially improves Text-to-SQL without updating model parameters. On 113 supervised Spider 2.0-Snow-0212 examples using GPT-5.5, Tahoe raises pass rate from 61.95 percent to 79.42 percent and pass-at-4 from 72.57 percent to 87.61 percent, achieves 100 percent Snowflake syntax pass rate, and reduces average compiler-feedback critic rounds from 2.79 to 0.12 per sampled candidate. The same Hint Bank also transfers to weaker backbones, including a 19.7 percentage-point pass-rate gain on Doubao-2.0-lite.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.