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

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Real-space spectral functions of three-dimensional billion-size topological non-Hermitian matter with tensor networks

arXiv:2606.16424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems host a wide range of unconventional topological phenomena while large-scale simulations in finite three dimensional systems remain challenging because of the rapidly growing number of sites. In particular, higher-order topological corner modes are often studied only in small lattices, where strong finite-size effects can mask their intrinsic behavior. Here, we develop a tensor-network framework that combines quantics tensor cross interpolation with the kernel polynomial method, enabling compact representations of large non-Hermitian tight-binding Hamiltonians and direct calculations of real-space spectral functions for systems exceeding one billion lattice sites. Using this approach, we investigate three-dimensional non-Hermitian higher-order topological insulators with with structured real-space geometries. The unprecedented system size enables direct access to the macroscopic regime and allows corner-mode spectral responses to be resolved in genuinely three-dimensional systems.By tuning the loss strength, we identify distinct in-gap corner modes across weak- and strong-loss regimes.Our results establish tensor-network algorithms as a powerful strategy to perform real-space spectral calculations in exceptionally large non-Hermitian systems.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Schrödinger Symmetry in Spherically-symmetric Static Mini-superspaces with Matter Fields

arXiv:2512.13651v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Schr\"{o}dinger symmetry has been shown to emerge in a ``fluid limit" from the full superspace to several mini-superspace models. To investigate one aspect of the robustness of this emergent symmetry, we consider two spherically-symmetric static mini-superspace models with matter fields at the classical level: (i) a Maxwell field with a cosmological constant and (ii) $n$ massless scalar fields. By developing a method based on canonical transformations, we demonstrate that for model (i), 3D Schrödinger symmetry emerges, and the solution is the (anti-)de Sitter Reissner-Nordström spacetime, and for model (ii), $(2+n)$D Schrödinger symmetry appears, and the solution is a generalized Janis-Newman-Winicour spacetime and its ``interior", a Kantowski-Sachs type closed universe. Furthermore, for the vacuum model, we find that 2D Schrödinger symmetry holds with different lapse functions and mini-superspace coordinates, suggesting the potential, yet unconfirmed, covariance of the symmetry. Finally, we propose a physical interpretation of the symmetry under the Hamiltonian constraint $H$: symmetry generators commuting with $H$ map a solution to another one, while those non-commuting with $H$ generate a new theory with the Schrödinger symmetry and the transformed configuration is a solution to the new theory. These results reinforce the robustness of the emergent Schrödinger symmetry and open new frontiers for exploring dynamics of matter and gravity.

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

PointDiffusion: Diffusion-Based Scene Completion in the Point Cloud Domain

Reconstructing dense 3D scenes from sparse LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving, where latent diffusion models offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches rely on object-level autoencoders that collapse into unstable global representations at outdoor scale and suffer from ground truth data corrupted by odometry drift that systematically degrades supervision quality. Furthermore, multi-step diffusion inference incurs prohibitive latency for real-time deployment. We propose a novel multi-token Gaussian VAE with cross-attention pooling for stable scene-scale LiDAR compression, combined with an anchor-based ICP ground truth refinement pipeline that eliminates drift-induced noise from training supervision. Together, these components enable a scaffold-free single-step diffusion completion model that achieves an approximately 16x reduction in squared Chamfer distance on SemanticKITTI seq. 08 (0.396 m^2 to 0.024 m^2), surpasses LiDiff and ScoreLiDAR by 17-19% and 10-11%, respectively, and operates at 25-143x lower inference latency. Our results demonstrate that data quality dominates model design in this regime and that multi-token latent spaces provide a stable first stage for latent diffusion-based scene completion.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

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

LongSpike: Fractional Order Spiking State Space Models for Efficient Long Sequence Learning

arXiv:2606.12895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well-regarded for their biological plausibility and energy efficiency in processing sequential data. However, dominant SNN architectures typically rely on first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to govern neuronal state transitions. This first-order assumption imposes a "memoryless" bottleneck, limiting the model's capacity to capture the complex, long-range dependencies inherent in long-sequence tasks. In this work, we propose LongSpike, a novel SNN framework that integrates fractional-order State-Space Modeling, or f-SSM, from control theory into the spiking domain. By extending traditional integer-order SSMs to the fractional-calculus regime, LongSpike enables the hierarchical integration of neuronal dynamics with long-memory kernels. To mitigate the computational overhead and parallelization challenges typically associated with fractional operators, we leverage a state-space formulation that supports efficient, parallel training. Empirical evaluations on challenging benchmarks, including Long Range Arena (LRA), large-scale WikiText-103, and Speech Commands, demonstrate that LongSpike outperforms state-of-the-art SNNs in accuracy while preserving sparse synaptic computation. The code is available at https://github.com/xinruihe389-commits/LongSpike.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural quantum states for entanglement depth certification from randomized Pauli measurements

arXiv:2512.13121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement depth quantifies how many qubits share genuine multipartite entanglement, but certification typically relies on tailored witnesses or full tomography, both of which scale poorly with system size. We recast entanglement-depth and non-$k$-separability certification as likelihood-based model selection among neural quantum states whose architecture enforces a chosen entanglement constraint. A hierarchy of separable neural quantum states is trained on finite-shot local Pauli outcomes and compared against an unconstrained reference model trained on the same data. When all constrained models are statistically disfavored, the data certify entanglement beyond the imposed limit directly from measurement statistics, without reconstructing the density matrix. We validate the method on simulated six- and ten-qubit datasets targeting GHZ, Dicke, and Bell-pair states, and demonstrate robustness for mixed states under local noise. Finally, we discuss lightweight interpretability diagnostics derived from trained parameters that expose coarse entanglement patterns and qubit groupings directly from bitstring statistics.

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

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

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

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

cuBayes: GPU accelerated FreeBayes that achieves 1-minute whole-genome SNV calling while maintaining algorithmic semantics

Next-generation sequencing now produces whole-genome data in hours, but downstream variant calling remains a multi-hour to multi-day bottleneck that excludes genomic analysis from time-critical clinical settings. GPU acceleration offers a natural path forward – variant calling is inherently parallelizable across genomic positions – yet open-source infrastructure for porting existing algorithms to GPU hardware remains limited, leaving many widely-used tools without accelerated implementations. FreeBayes, a haplotype-based variant caller central to the 1000 Genomes Project and to multi-sample tumor evolution analyses, exemplifies this gap: it is natively single-threaded despite its algorithmic suitability for parallelization. We present cuBayes, a CUDA implementation of FreeBayes germline SNV calling that completes HG002 and HG004 2x250bp Illumina 60x whole-genome analysis in one minute (as opposed to hours if not days with manual region-based CPU parallelization) on a single NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU, while producing variant calls with >99.9% concordance to the CPU reference. cuBayes is structured around an atom/molecule architecture in which reusable functional units (BAM decompression, position-wise pileup, batch coordination) are cleanly separated from algorithm-specific logic, providing a foundation intended to support acceleration of additional sequence analysis algorithms without redundant low-level engineering.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Neural Correlates of Human Food Memory link to Microbial, Homeostatic, and Hedonic Signals: Evidence from a Prebiotic Randomized Clinical Trial

Background Homeostatic and hedonic brain circuits regulate eating behavior but also shape how food memories are encoded and retrieved. Objective We examined neural correlates during food memory encoding and retrieval during functional MRI before and after a 14-day prebiotic intervention in a preregistered, double-blind crossover trial (NCT03829189). Design 55 healthy adults with overweight (19 females, age 28{+/-}6.5, BMI 25-30 kg/m2) underwent 3 Tesla task-based functional MRI before and after dietary intervention of prebiotic (30g inulin/day) or equicaloric placebo for 14 days. Peripheral metabolic, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), and microbial markers using 16S rRNA analysis were assessed in fasting blood and feces. Results Food memory was enhanced by assigned reward value and engaged brain activity in hedonic regions, including the nucleus accumbens, orbitofrontal cortex, caudate, cingulate, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and ventral tegmental area, as well as homeostatic and memory-related such as the hypothalamus and the hippocampus. Higher neural activations during food encoding were related to higher Actinobacteriota abundance, fecal SCFA acetate, and creatinine levels, and lower ghrelin levels. Activations in reward-related and homeostatic brain areas partially correlated with insulin, glucagon-like peptide-1, leptin, and thyroid-stimulating hormone levels. Neural activations related to food memory decreased after prebiotic intervention. The prebiotic supplementation induced decrease of hippocampal activity during food encoding related to changes in gut microbiota Firmicutes abundance. Conclusions This study indicates that neuronal food-related memory processes depend on homeostatic and hedonic brain signals modulated by the gut-brain axis. Our findings raise implications for the treatment of obesity and substance use disorder.

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

MixTeX: Data-Efficient LaTeX OCR via Synthetic Pretraining and Limited Fine-Tuning

LaTeX OCR converts scientific document images into editable LaTeX code. Existing systems rely on large paired datasets, which are costly to collect and limited for low-resource languages. This paper presents MIXTEX, a data-efficient system using synthetic pretraining without real LaTeX sources. Unlike Nougat that depends on arXiv datasets, we generate training data by randomly pairing grammatical Wikipedia text with LaTeX formulas, requiring only syntactic correctness. This eliminates dependency on real document collections, enables scalable data generation (120M tokens), and supports low-resource languages. Following synthetic pretraining, adaptation requires only 400 real samples. Evaluation on a 977-sample benchmark with printed and handwritten English and Chinese shows that this two-stage strategy outperforms methods trained on large real datasets while requiring less human effort and computation. Data, code, and models are publicly available.

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

Scale or Reason? A Compute-Equivalent Analysis of Reasoning Distillation

Distilling reasoning traces from strong teacher models has become the standard recipe for building capable small language models. Yet reasoning traces are 5-20$\times$ longer than standard instruction fine-tuning (IFT) outputs, meaning every practitioner who chooses reasoning distillation implicitly forgoes training a larger IFT model on the same compute budget. Whether this trade-off is worthwhile remains unaddressed. We study it with a controlled experiment: a single teacher generates paired IFT and reasoning outputs for identical prompts by toggling only its reasoning mode, isolating supervision format as the sole variable. Training students at five scales (0.5B to 14B) and evaluating on 18 benchmarks, we find that at matched FLOPs, IFT lies on or near the Pareto frontier across the majority of configurations. Reasoning reaches the Pareto frontier only on open-ended tasks at 7B and above. Even there, a sequential curriculum mixing just 25-50\% reasoning data with IFT captures most of the accuracy benefit at far lower compute cost.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Measuring Rényi entropy with an Echo Protocol

arXiv:2504.05237v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present efficient and practical protocols to measure the second Rényi entropy, whose exponential is known as the purity. Our approach is based on expressing the purity in terms of transition probabilities generated by an echo-type forward-backward evolution sequence, making it applicable to quantum many-body systems. Notably, our approach does not rely on random-noise averaging, a feature that can be extended to protocols to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions, as we demonstrate. By way of example, we show that our protocols can be practically implemented in superconducting qubit-based platforms, as well as in cavity-QED trapped ultra-cold gases.

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

Posterior Twins: Distributional Behavioral Simulation for Enterprise Decisions

作者:

arXiv:2606.16415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise behavioral simulation requires more than producing a plausible response. Many decisions depend on the shape of a population under a proposed action: which segments accept, defect, hesitate, or move into risk-sensitive states. This paper introduces Posterior Twins, a memory-grounded digital-twin approach that represents likely behavior as an updated distribution under a specific decision context. We evaluate a family of Twinning Labs behavioral-model operating points on a 226-example held-out behavioral-response benchmark and report both modal accuracy and Wasserstein-1 distance. The results show that modal accuracy and distributional fidelity identify different operating regimes. TL-Twin Alpha achieves the lowest observed Wasserstein-1 distance in the reported result set ($W_1 = 1.16$), while TL-Twin Delta and TL-Twin Gamma provide balanced operating points near the modal-accuracy frontier. The paper frames these results as a systems result: governed memory, behavioral model routing, scenario orchestration, distributional aggregation, and auditability are necessary for turning simulated behavior into reusable enterprise decision evidence.

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

Predicting gestational age at birth in the context of preterm birth from multi-modal fetal MRI

arXiv:2606.20172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preterm birth is associated with significant mortality and a risk for lifelong morbidity. The complex multifactorial aetiology hampers accurate prediction and thus optimal care. A pipeline consisting of bespoke machine learning methods for data imputation, feature selection, and regression models to predict gestational age (GA) at birth was developed and evaluated from comprehensive multi-modal morphological and functional fetal MRI data from 333 control cases and 93 preterm birth cases. The GA at birth predictions were classified into term and preterm categories and their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were reported. An ablation study was performed to further validate the design of the pipeline. Performance was evaluated using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The pipeline achieves an R2 score of 0.13 and a mean absolute error of 2.74 weeks. It also achieves a 0.77 accuracy, 0.59 sensitivity, and 0.82 specificity across folds. The predominant features selected by the pipeline include cervical length and statistics derived from placental T2* values. The confluence of fast, motion-robust and multi-modal fetal MRI techniques and machine learning prediction allowed the prediction of the gestation at birth. This information is essential for any pregnancy. To the best of our knowledge, preterm birth had only been addressed as a classification problem in the literature. Therefore, this work provides a proof of concept. Future work will increase the cohort size to allow for finer stratification within the preterm birth cohort. Our code is available at https://github.com/dfajardorojas/ml-for-preterm-birth-.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

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

Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

作者:

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling agents to learn targeted modifications while maintaining overall model performance. We evaluate the framework on bias mitigation in text classification and machine unlearning in image classification, both of which traditionally rely on specialized algorithms. Our results show that the learned policies reduce forget set accuracy to nearly 0% while preserving over 90% retain set accuracy on the unlearning task. In the bias mitigation setting, the learned policies improve bias-related performance by more than 5% while maintaining general classification utility. Our findings show that neural model editing can be cast as a reinforcement learning problem, allowing editing policies to be learned from reward feedback rather than manually engineered for each task.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Topological Codes Based on Space Groups

arXiv:2606.20548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological codes form one of the most important classes of stabilizer codes. Most existing algebraic constructions and analyses of topological codes assume translation invariance. Here we show that topological codes can arise in more general settings by incorporating point group operations. The central construction is a class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called space-group codes, whose check operators are built from group-algebra templates over space groups that combine translations with point-group operations. We develop methods for analyzing topological properties of space-group codes using ring-modules and their invariant theory. At first glance, space-group codes might appear to complicate practical implementation; however, we find that they can exhibit greater locality than previous codes based purely on translations. Our framework thus extends the landscape of topological codes and opens up a broader design space for the co-design of topological codes with quantum computing platforms.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

VQE as Initial State Preparation for QPE on Heisenberg Spin-Glass Hamiltonians

arXiv:2606.15061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) is the quantum algorithmic workhorse for computing ground state energies of quantum Hamiltonians with quantum computers. Ground state energy calculation of physical systems is perhaps the most promising use case for quantum computing in terms of scientific and commercial value with a plausible path to outperformance of classical alternatives. This path, however, hinges on the availability of initial states for QPE with significant overlap with the true ground state. Using extensive (classical) numerical computations, we study whether the NISQ-era algorithm VQE (Variational Quantum Eigensolver) could be used to efficiently prepare high-overlap states of disordered fully-connected anisotropic Heisenberg spin glass quantum Hamiltonians with up to $15$ qubits. We find that (i) – consistent with widely held, but rarely numerically illustrated beliefs – VQE is generally unable to efficiently converge to the ground state for our Hamiltonians, which is a well-known issue with VQE due to a variety of factors including vanishing gradients and local minima; (ii) low energy states do not necessarily have large ground-state overlap, but there is typically a correlation between the two measures; (iii) adding more than three layers to the VQE ansatz neither improves overlap nor the energies found; and (iv) the best-found overlap scaling as a function of the Hamiltonian system size is not strongly exponentially decreasing, suggesting potential for VQE to be a heuristic state preparation algorithm for QPE.

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

Probabilistic Agents in Deterministic Audits: Evaluating Multi-Agent Systems for Automated Audits Based on the German IT-Grundschutz

arXiv:2606.25622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The NIS-2 Directive mandates robust Risk Management from thousands of small and medium enterprises. To ensure compliance, companies rely on established standards such as the German IT-Grundschutz (IT-GS) of the Federal Office for Information Security. However, IT-GS certification is resource-intensive and requires a high level of manual effort for documentation, validation, and revision, making scalable implementation difficult and expensive. Building upon our previous conceptual framework, this paper presents the technical implementation and empirical evaluation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture combined with Hybrid Retrieval Augmented Generation (HybridRAG) for the partial automation of IT-GS certification. We introduce two novel technical contributions to the MAS architecture to enforce the compliance rigor. The Hypothesis-Verification Loop in the Structural Analysis (SA) phase that cross-references agent-inferred dependencies against the Knowledge Graph to reduce hallucinations, and a Decoupled Reasoning Pipeline that separates agent-driven semantic extraction from the deterministic protection need inheritance. We utilize the BSI's "RecPlast GmbH" case study as a human expert-generated reference data set for end-to-end evaluation of the architecture and to quantify Precision, Recall, and F1-scores. The performance of the system is investigated across the phases of SA, Protection Needs Assessment (PNA), Modeling, and IT-GS Check. The empirical results reveal noticeable differences throughout the different steps of IT-GS. While the MAS demonstrates high efficacy in semantic tasks (SA and Modeling), significantly reducing manual effort through automated information extraction, quantitative results reveal limitations in logical reasoning phases (PNA and IT-GS Check) as the probabilistic nature of current LLMs struggles to meet the deterministic rigor required by IT-GS.