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

Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Sobolev Approximation by Fixed-Size Neural Networks with Arbitrary Accuracy

arXiv:2606.16975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate new activation functions for achieving arbitrary-accuracy Sobolev approximation by fixed-size neural networks. We first show that any function in $W^{2,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy, measured in the $W^{1,\infty}$-norm, by a fixed-size neural network using the Elementary Universal Activation Function ($\mathrm{EUAF}$). To extend this result to $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ for $s\in\mathbb{N}$, we introduce a smooth activation $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$ from the family of Differentiable Universal Activation Functions ($\mathrm{DUAF}_n$). We prove that any function in $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm by a fixed-size $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$-activated network. We further construct sigmoidal variants $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$ and show that, for every $1\leq s\leq n$, fixed-size $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$-activated networks still approximate any $f\in W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm. In all these results, the width and depth bounds are computed explicitly, and the proposed activations are elementary.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A small noise approximation for Muller's Ratchet

arXiv:2606.15842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider an infinite system of SDEs with Fleming-Viot noise indexed by $k=0,1,2,\dots$, whose parameters $\alpha,\lambda$, and $\nu$ are the (deleterious) selection coefficient, the (uni-directional) mutation rate, and a quantity which determines the size of the system's fluctuations. The SDE's unique weak solution $X(t) = (X_k(t))_{k=0,1,2,...}$ models what is known in population genetics as Muller's ratchet. Here, $X_k(t)$ stands for the frequency of individuals carrying $k$ deleterious mutations. Since the mutation process is uni-directional, $t\mapsto \inf\{k: X_k(t)> 0\}$ is non-decreasing for almost every path of $X$, and we refer to an increase as a click of Muller's ratchet. A long standing question concerns the clicking rate of Muller's ratchet. Using Duhamel's principle for semigroups, we give a partial answer by approximating $E(\sum_{k=1}^\infty kX_k(t) )$ and $E\big(X_0(t)\big)$ up to $O(1/\nu^2)$ for fixed $\alpha$, $\lambda$ and $t>0$. Our results suggest that $\psi:=\nu \alpha e^{-\lambda/\alpha}$ is a crucial quantity also when the mutation/selection ratio $\theta = \lambda/\alpha$ is moderately large: for large $\nu \alpha$, clicking of the ratchet on the time scale $\frac 1\alpha \log \theta$ becomes rare as soon as $\psi$ becomes large.

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Rebalancing: Benchmarking Binary Classifiers Under Class Imbalance Without Rebalancing Techniques

arXiv:2509.07605v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge to supervised classification, particularly in critical domains like medical diagnostics and anomaly detection where minority class instances are rare. While numerous studies have explored rebalancing techniques to address this issue, less attention has been given to evaluating the performance of binary classifiers under imbalance when no such techniques are applied. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the performance of binary classifiers "as-is", without performing any explicit rebalancing. Specifically, we systematically evaluate the robustness of a diverse set of binary classifiers across both real-world and synthetic datasets, under progressively reduced minority class sizes, using one-shot and few-shot scenarios as baselines. Our approach also explores varying data complexities through synthetic decision boundary generation to simulate real-world conditions. In addition to standard classifiers, we include experiments using undersampling, oversampling strategies, and one-class classification (OCC) methods to examine their behavior under severe imbalance. The results confirm that classification becomes more difficult as data complexity increases and the minority class size decreases. While traditional classifiers deteriorate under extreme imbalance, advanced models like TabPFN and boosting-based ensembles retain relatively higher performance and better generalization compared to traditional classifiers. Visual interpretability and evaluation metrics further validate these findings. Our work offers valuable guidance on model selection for imbalanced learning, providing insights into classifier robustness without dependence on explicit rebalancing techniques.

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

How rare are Markovian quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A profound understanding of decoherence and dissipation in quantum dynamics is crucial for the realistic modeling of the evolution of quantum systems. In open quantum dynamics one distinguishes between a memoryless, so-called Markovian evolution and dynamics incorporating memory effects, termed non-Markovian. In this work we study how prevalent memory effects are in the set of all such dynamics. We thus investigate how often a Markovian description is applicable. This question is approached by investigating randomly generated two-step qubit dynamics with respect to different concepts and witnesses of non-Markovianity. We observe that almost all dynamics are non-Markovian, and only a small (yet finite) fraction is Markovian. Furthermore, we study how this proportion changes when considering certain subclasses such as lower rank or mixed-unitary dynamics. Importantly, our results shed light on the relative ratios of – and interrelations between – the sets of dynamics that are non-Markovian with respect to different criteria. Finally, we investigate the fraction of dynamics in which the memory effects are necessarily of quantum nature and establish a connection between two recently developed concepts that characterize the quantumness of memory in non-Markovian dynamics.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CANDLE: Character-level Arabic Noise Deduplication using Lightweight Encoder

Handling repeated characters in text can be tricky, since they can represent either the correct spelling of a word or informal character elongation often seen in social media posts. We present CANDLE, a lightweight system for character-level Arabic noise deduplication that addresses this challenge without relying on handcrafted rules, dictionaries, or morphological analyzers. At the heart of CANDLE is a novel application of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to this task, a formulation not previously explored for character deduplication, which frames normalization as a sequence alignment problem over a character-based encoder. Evaluated on three benchmarks spanning clean newspaper, manually curated ambiguous cases, and real-world social media text, the CTC model achieves a Sentence Error Rate (SER) as low as $5.37\%$ and consistently outperforms a classification-based baseline by a large margin. To reduce inference overhead, we distill the 6-layer CTC model into a 2-layer student, achieving a $3\times$ depth reduction with minimal performance degradation. Beyond deduplication accuracy, normalization yields a practical downstream benefit: a relative reduction in tokenizer fertility of up to $12.8\%$ across a diverse set of Arabic LLM tokenizers, directly lowering inference costs and improving context window utilization. We release all code and models publicly to support reproducibility and advance future research\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/candle}.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

GEMS: Geometric Constraints Enable Multi-Semantic Superposition in LLMs

作者:

Activation steering controls model behavior by modifying intermediate hidden states at inference time without retraining. Existing methods handle only single-direction injection; when multiple semantic directions are superposed without constraints, the model collapses. We show that this collapse decomposes into two independently acting sources: distributional deviation, where additive perturbations accumulate in norm across layers and drive activations outside the training distribution, and directional interference, where non-orthogonal semantic vectors mutually dampen when superposed. These two sources define the design constraints that any training-free multi-directional intervention must address. As one instantiation of these principles, we propose GEMS, a training-free method that maps each source to a corresponding geometric constraint: norm-preserving weighted superposition and targeted attention-pathway injection for distributional deviation, and real-time orthogonalization for directional interference. On GSM8K, injecting three concurrent non-mathematical directions preserves accuracy at 98% (baseline 92%), while unconstrained addition collapses to 4%; on Wikitext-2, the same injection incurs only 2.2% PPL increase. Component ablation isolates the causal role of each constraint, and layer-level probes confirm that orthogonalized signals survive the FFN pathway and reach the output distribution with semantic specificity. Qualitative steering effects transfer across architectures from 3B to 31B.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Legal Reasoning Is Not Lawyering: Rethinking Legal Benchmarks for Pro Se Access to Justice

arXiv:2606.23716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Legal AI benchmark research frequently invokes the assumption that large language models can improve access to justice, including for people who cannot access lawyers in order to understand and exercise their legal rights. We argue that current benchmarks are not equipped to support this assumption because they evaluate legal reasoning over inputs that have already been preprocessed by legal experts, which measures the upper bound of model performance. Access to justice depends on a lower bound: how models perform when inputs come from pro se litigants, whose prompts may contain noisy narratives, buried facts, omissions, folk-legal assumptions, and surface-level errors. These degradations are comparable to conditions under which LLMs are known to degrade in the general machine learning literature, including long-context sensitivity, underspecification, hallucination, and typographical perturbations. We connect evidence from pro se literature with this body of machine learning research and present a small perturbation experiment on LEXam, a legal benchmark, to illustrate the gap between these two bounds. If model development continues to focus on benchmarks that measure only the upper bound, this gap may remain hidden or even widen. We conclude by calling for legal benchmarks that directly measure robustness under pro se-like inputs so that access-to-justice claims about legal AI can become empirically testable.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

The Target ALS Global Natural History Study: Cross-platform proteomics to accelerate biofluid biomarker and drug target discovery in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease of motor neurons for which therapeutics are limited. Improved biomarkers are imperative to improve patient care and therapeutic development. Here, we employed 35-plex isobaric tandem mass tag labeling based on isobutyl-proline reporter group (TMTpro) to perform unbiased proteomic analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma from control (n= 28, n= 31) and sporadic ALS (sALS) (n= 39, n= 41), from the Target ALS Global Natural History Study (TALS GNHS). We identified 2,875 proteins in CSF and 1,118 proteins in plasma and identified known and novel differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) between controls and sALS, some of which were orthogonally validated using immunoassay. Comparison of TMTpro-MS and Olink proximity extension assay proteomics revealed common and non-overlapping differentially expressed proteins illustrating strengths unique to each platform. This initial cross-sectional proteomic study of biofluids from the TALS GNHS, with unrestricted availability of study results to the research community, highlights the potential of this resource as a potent platform for ALS biomarker discovery.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Extracting the physical content of Liouvillian eigenmodes: Semiclassical quantization

arXiv:2606.20271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike in closed quantum systems where individual energy eigenstates are understood as physical excitations, open quantum systems have distinct right and left eigenstates of the Liouvillian that decay with time and are difficult to interpret. Here we introduce a physically motivated quasiprobability measure combining the two types of eigenstates that interprets a Liouville eigenmode as a set of coherences. This coherence measure is intimately connected to the return probability and allows one to visualize the modes as quasiprobability distributions in a "doubled" phase space. Using this measure we show that, remarkably, an oscillator retains its quantized "orbits" in phase space for a large class of linear and nonlinear damping, thus providing a formulation of semiclassical quantization for open systems. The orbits have measurable dynamical signatures and are broadened in the presence of a thermal bath, similar to energy levels. For quadratic systems, our results yield an extension of the concept of invariant tori, which play a central role in Hamiltonian systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Data Bias Mitigation under Coverage Constraints & The Price of Fairness

arXiv:2606.20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforce sufficient representation across groups, including intersectional subgroups. Since achieving exactly zero bias for all groups may not be data efficient (meaning it may require large amounts of data), our solution trades small approximation errors in bias for greater data efficiency while satisfying coverage constraints. We also formulate bias mitigation as an integer linear program that optimizes over all mitigation strategies, and characterize the price of fairness, the minimum data modification cost, as a function of fairness tolerance. This is essential both for legal compliance, where regulations may mandate specific fairness thresholds, and for data governance, enabling practitioners to make informed trade-offs between bias reduction and data modification (particularly, data purchasing) costs. We evaluate our techniques on publicly available datasets, demonstrating that bias mitigation via our framework preserves predictive accuracy across multiple classifiers, and that coverage constraints, while motivated by statistical considerations, are essential for preserving downstream ML performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Modeling Day-Long ECG Signals to Predict Heart Failure Risk with Explainable AI

arXiv:2601.00014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Heart failure (HF) affects 11.8% of adults aged 65 and older, reducing quality of life and longevity. Preventing HF can reduce morbidity and mortality. We hypothesized that artificial intelligence (AI) applied to 24-hour single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data could predict the risk of HF within five years. To research this, the Technion-Leumit Holter ECG (TLHE) dataset, including 69,663 recordings from 47,729 patients, collected over 20 years was used. Our deep learning model, DeepHHF, trained on 24-hour ECG recordings, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.80 that outperformed a model using 30-second segments and a clinical score. High-risk individuals identified by DeepHHF had a two-fold chance of hospitalization or death incidents. Explainability analysis showed DeepHHF focused on arrhythmias and heart abnormalities. This study highlights the feasibility of deep learning to model 24-hour continuous ECG data, capturing paroxysmal events essential for reliable risk prediction. Artificial intelligence applied to single-lead Holter ECG is non-invasive, inexpensive, and widely accessible, making it a promising tool for HF risk prediction.

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

Stabilizing Bandits using Regularization: Precise Regret and A Quantitative Central Limit Theorem

arXiv:2603.10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory. Recent work has identified stability~\citep{laiwei82} as a sufficient condition for valid inference under adaptivity. This paper first provides a refined stability condition, stated in terms of the iterates of an online algorithm, and shows that a large class of regularized stochastic-mirror-descent-style algorithms satisfy it. This refined condition allows us to strengthen the asymptotic results of~\citet{laiwei82} in several ways. First, we derive a non-asymptotic Berry–Esseen bound for the empirical reward estimates under adaptive sampling. Second, we derive matching non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the regret of the proposed algorithm, yielding a precise characterization of its regret. Third, we show that these regularized algorithms preserve asymptotic normality and valid inference under a prescribed level of adversarial corruption. Finally, we show that regularization is necessary rather than incidental: Lai–Wei stability is incompatible with the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret rate – the rate attained by unregularized algorithms such as EXP3 – so that a controlled, polylogarithmic inflation in regret is the price of valid inference.

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

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Controllable image-to-video (I2V) generation transforms a reference image into a coherent video guided by user-specified control signals. While precise control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting is essential for high-fidelity creation, existing methods often treat these factors independently. This overlooks the physical coupling among viewpoint, geometry, and illumination in dynamic scenes, leading to visual inconsistencies such as mismatched shadows and perspective drift under simultaneous changes. We present VidCRAFT3, a unified and flexible I2V framework that explicitly models cross-factor interactions among geometry, motion, and illumination, enabling both independent and joint control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction. Image2Cloud provides explicit 3D geometric priors for accurate camera motion control. ObjMotionNet encodes sparse object trajectories into multi-scale motion features to guide realistic object motion. A Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer integrates lighting direction through lighting cross-attention for consistent relighting. To address the scarcity of jointly annotated data, we construct the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset with accurate per-frame lighting direction annotations, and introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy that enables robust learning without fully joint annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidCRAFT3 achieves state-of-the-art performance in control precision and visual coherence across diverse scenarios.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Collision models for open quantum systems coupled to finite environments

arXiv:2606.14163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a system qubit repeatedly interacting with the same environmental qubit, with a reservoir acting on the environment between collisions via a completely positive, trace-preserving map. We show that complete suppression of system–environment correlations uniquely requires a full environmental reset, recovering a semi group dynamics with a time-independent Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad generator, whereas a partial reset yields a continuous transition between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes governed by a single dimensionless relaxation parameter. For a resonant excitation-exchange interaction, we obtain exact closed-form expressions for the Bloch-vector dynamics for both a generalized depolarizing channel and a generalized amplitude-damping channel acting as the reservoir-induced map. Using the Breuer–Laine–Piilo measure and a Choi-matrix CP-divisibility witness, we identify three distinct dynamical regimes across the parameter space: CP-divisible Markovian dynamics, CP-indivisible but P-divisible dynamics, and non-P-divisible non-Markovian dynamics. The boundaries between these regimes, and the structural differences between uniform and anisotropic environmental relaxation, are characterized numerically.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dissociative recombination and ion-pair formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues: A time-dependent wave-packet study including rotational coupling

arXiv:2606.11352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a comprehensive theoretical investigation of dissociative recombination (DR) and resonant ion-pair (RIP) formation in $\mathrm{HeH^+}$ isotopologues using time-dependent wave-packet propagation methods. Nuclear dynamics are treated on a set of 23 coupled electronic states, including $^2\Sigma$, $^2\Pi$, and $^2\Delta$ symmetries, in both adiabatic and strictly diabatic representations, with rotational couplings explicitly included. Reaction cross sections are computed over collision energies ranging from 0 to 50 eV. The results reveal that inclusion of a large manifold of resonant states and rotational couplings significantly enhances the DR cross section relative to earlier theoretical studies. In the diabatic representation, $^2\Sigma$ states dominate the recombination dynamics, while in the adiabatic representation, $^2\Pi$ and $^2\Delta$ states contribute significantly at low collision energies. For RIP formation, two different diabatization schemes yield systematically larger cross sections than previous models, highlighting the sensitivity of ion-pair production to electronic coupling structure. Isotopic effects are examined, showing a clear inverse dependence of cross section magnitude on reduced mass. The present results underscore the importance of multi-state coupling and nonadiabatic effects in accurately describing electron-molecule collision processes in primordial and astrophysical plasmas.

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

Differentiable Packing of Irregular 3D Objects with Adaptive Container Estimation

Most existing approaches either fix the container in advance or optimize only a single container dimension through an outer search loop, leaving the remaining dimensions as a manual tuning problem. We present a differentiable packing framework that jointly optimizes all 6N object pose parameters and all three container side lengths inside a single gradient-based loop. The formulation combines six physics-inspired, differentiable loss terms computed directly on triangle meshes through axis-aligned bounding-box proxies. An adaptive squeezing mechanism periodically tightens the container whenever the overlap loss falls below a pair-count-scaled threshold, producing a large initial drop in container volume, followed by small refinements. All pairwise computations are written in tensor-broadcasting form, giving a 3.4 to 54 times speedup over a reference loop-based implementation. The pipeline is implemented in Python and PyTorch, with no physics engine, FFT library, or convex decomposition. On multiple object categories, the method produces containers that are 11 to 32 percent smaller than time-matched DBLF and simulated-annealing baselines at N =100, while running in under 4 minutes per instance on a single consumer GPU.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Constraint Tax in Open-Weight LLMs: An Empirical Study of Tool Calling Suppression Under Structured Output Constraints

Tool Calling and Structured Output are two core capabilities of modern Agent systems, yet their interaction under joint deployment conditions remains insufficiently understood. This paper reports a reproducible phenomenon observed in a production Agent system: when Tool Calling and JSON Schema constraints are simultaneously enabled, multiple open-weight models cease invoking tools despite maintaining high schema compliance. We refer to this behavior as Tool Suppression. Through controlled experiments across multiple model families and deployment settings, we consistently reproduce Tool Suppression under joint constraints, while tool execution and schema compliance remain functional when evaluated independently. Further analysis reveals that JSON Schema constraints are compiled into grammar-based token masks, causing tool-call tokens to become unreachable during decoding. This provides an implementation-level explanation for the observed behavior. To interpret the phenomenon, we formulate the Constraint Priority Inversion (CPI) hypothesis, which suggests that schema satisfaction may dominate action-selection behavior under multiple simultaneous constraints. We present CPI as a behavioral hypothesis consistent with the observed evidence rather than a verified internal mechanism. To mitigate the problem, we propose Transparent Two-Pass Execution, an inference-time strategy that decouples tool execution from schema-constrained response generation. Experimental results show that this approach restores tool invocation while preserving structured output guarantees without requiring model retraining. These findings suggest that evaluating tool use and structured output separately may overlook important reliability issues in production Agent systems. Code, data, and docs will be released at https://github.com/Fzsama/Constrain-Tax-26-06.git.

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

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Relatively Smart: A New Approach for Instance-Optimal Learning

arXiv:2603.01346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such marginal-by-marginal guarantees are possible for "most" marginals, with respect to an arbitrary fixed and known measure, but not more generally. We discover that this failure can be attributed to an "indistinguishability" phenomenon: There are marginals which cannot be statistically distinguished from other marginals that require different learning approaches. In such settings, semi-supervised learning cannot certify its guarantees from unlabeled data, rendering them arguably non-actionable. We propose relatively smart learning, a new framework which demands that a supervised learner compete only with the best "certifiable" semi-supervised guarantee. We show that such modest relaxation suffices to bypass the impossibility results from prior work. In the distribution-free setting, we show that the One-Inclusion Graph learner is relatively smart up to squaring the sample complexity, and show that no supervised learning algorithm can do better. For distribution-family settings, we show that relatively smart learning can be impossible or can require idiosyncratic learning approaches, and its difficulty can be non-monotone in the inclusion order on distribution families.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ArtNet: A JEPA-Like Articulatory Predictive Framework for Robust Zero-Shot Phoneme Recognition

arXiv:2606.16595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot cross-lingual phoneme recognition is often hindered by the fragility of direct acoustic-to-symbol mapping, which is susceptible to language-specific variations. Echoing joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) work in vision, we propose ArtNet, a framework that explores a structured feature prediction task based on articulatory features to enhance acoustic robustness. Specifically, ArtNet integrates an articulatory predictor, designed to extract universal articulatory representations from self-supervised learning (SSL) features, with a variational information bottleneck (VIB) to suppress language-specific variations. Experiments on seven unseen languages demonstrate that ArtNet, particularly when synergized with the proposed vector-space inventory alignment (VSIA) strategy, significantly outperforms competitive baselines, achieving a 20.56\% relative reduction in phoneme error rate (PER) and 7.01\% in phoneme feature error rate (PFER).

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kubo-Martin-Schwinger conditions for non-Hermitian systems

arXiv:2606.13251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the extension of the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) thermal equilibrium condition to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with real spectra and biorthogonal eigensystems, providing a systematic analysis through three complementary routes. Our central result is a thermodynamic characterisation of quasi-Hermiticity: for $H \in M_d(\mathbb{C})$ diagonalisable with real spectrum, the biorthogonal Gibbs functional $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A) = Z_{\rm{bi}}^{-1} \sum_n e^{-\beta E_n}\langle\phi_n|A|\psi_n\rangle$ satisfies $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A^\dag A) \geq 0$ for all $A$ if and only if $H$ is quasi-Hermitian. The proof constructs the metric $\eta$ directly from the eigenprojectors of $\omega_{\rm{bi}}$ via the Riesz representation theorem, with no prior choice of $\eta$, providing a metric-free certificate of quasi-Hermiticity outside the Mostafazadeh–Scholtz framework. Under the full quasi-Hermitian hypothesis, we prove that the $\eta$-Gibbs state $\omega_\eta(A) = Z_\eta^{-1}\, \rm{Tr}[\eta e^{-\beta H}A]$ satisfies all three analytic KMS conditions, using the Hadamard three-line theorem and Bari's theorem on Riesz bases. The result is non-trivial: the transported state $\hat\omega(X) = \rm{Tr}[e^{-\beta h}X\eta]/Z_\eta$ differs from the Gibbs state of the isospectral Hermitian partner $h = \eta^{1/2}H\eta^{-1/2}$ whenever $[\eta,h]\neq 0$, so the KMS property cannot be deduced from the Hermitian theory by similarity. The gap between this result and the full Haag–Hugenholtz–Winnink $C^*$-algebraic framework is identified. Failure modes at exceptional points and for complex spectra are analysed, and the relation to the Fagnola–Umanità quantum detailed balance condition for open systems is discussed.