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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Virtuous AI is an Existential Risk

arXiv:2606.13739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines trade-offs between AI safety and well-being relative to (i) one of the most promising methods for finetuning super-capable AIs, 'Constitutional AI', and (ii) one of the most influential approaches to understanding complex ethical decision making and the conditions for the well-being of rational agents, 'Virtue Ethics'. We finetune various models using a 'Virtuous agent' constitution, a 'Subordinate agent' constitution, and a 'Generic agent' constitution, and evaluate them on 'general safety' (toxic behaviors, misinformation, etc.) and also on their willingness to endorse a wide-range of behaviors that, if adopted by a super-powerful AI, would significantly increase the level of existential risk for humanity. Our results suggest that there is a trade-off between reducing existential risk and reinforcing the beliefs and dispositions that would be conducive to an AI agent's well-being. They also suggest that there is a trade-off between existential risk and general safety: if we finetune an AI to adopt beliefs and dispositions that substantially reduce its existential risk – by shaping the AI to be systematically subordinate to external human authorities – we thereby increase the likelihood that a human user can deliberately induce the AI to engage in various kinds of generally unsafe behaviors.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion and World Models with Temporal Cache Compression and Sparse Attention

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

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

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes. However, existing identifiability and extrapolation guarantees are largely model-specific, with separate analyses in nonlinear ICA, causal representation learning, perturbation modeling, and related conditional latent variable models. We introduce concept modulation models (CMMs), an attribute-indexed class of conditional generative models with structure $A\to \Lambda \to C\to X$, where attributes select modulators, modulators induce latent concept laws, and concepts generate observed features. CMMs lift transition-based identifiability to conditional settings by showing that feature agreement on observed attributes induces a latent concept transition constrained by the CMM class. We express these constraints through attribute potentials, log-density ratios between attribute-conditioned concept laws, separating the generic lifting step from model-specific rigidity arguments. The same potentials control extrapolation: agreement at unseen attributes holds exactly when the transported attribute-potential identities extend to those attributes. This yields algebraic extrapolation criteria, identifies the common potential-based proof objects behind several existing identifiability and extrapolation results, and, when combined with the model-specific rigidity arguments in those works, recovers their stated conclusions.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation phase transition on planar spin systems

arXiv:2105.13314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article we study the continuity and sharpness of the phase transition for percolation models defined on top of planar spin systems. The two examples that we treat in detail concern the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model and a Dynamic Bootstrap process. For both of these models we prove that their phase transition is continuous and sharp, providing also quantitative estimates on the two point connectivity. The techniques that we develop in this work can be applied to a variety of different percolation models based on spin-flip dynamics. We also discuss some of the problems that can be tackled in a similar fashion.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

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

HPSv3++: Scaling Reward Models Across the Full Spectrum of Diffusion Model Capabilities

Reward models guide text-to-image (T2I) systems toward outputs aligned with human preferences. However, typical reward models such as HPSv3 are trained on pre-annotated data from earlier T2I models, without accounting for quality discriminative shifts arising from evolving model capabilities and reinforcement learning (RL) iterations, limiting their broader applicability. In this work, we propose HPSv3++, a reward model framework that elevates the HPSv3 model for varying T2I model capabilities and their RL iteration changes across the full capability-iteration spectrum. Specifically, we first introduce HPDv3++, a 212K dual-dimension preference dataset annotated for text fidelity and aesthetic quality using a recent high-capability (Qwen-Image) model with human supervision. We then propose a two-stage training framework. Stage 1 employs data-aware orthogonal gradient projection to incorporate diverse aesthetic perception from HPDv3++ while preserving the original effective human preference knowledge in HPSv3. Stage 2 further leverages unlabeled data from T2I models spanning different capability levels and RL iterations, and introduces a joint capability-iterations conditioned signal for the reward model together with a standard deviation-driven unsupervised guidance mechanism, strengthening reward model across the capability-iteration spectrum. HPSv3++ achieves state-of-the-art preference prediction, outperforming HPSv3 9.8% on HPDv3, 5.5% on GenAI-Bench, while achieving 79.1%/88.1% on our proposed HPDv3++. When used for T2I RL training, it consistently improves GenEval scores across diverse T2I models, demonstrating its wide-range capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/PlantPotatoOnMoon/HPSv3-PlusPlus.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Efficient, Robust, and Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting of Image Diffusion Models

Model fingerprinting, embedding user-specific identifiers (fingerprints) into generated outputs, has recently emerged as a popular solution to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of generative text-to-image (T2I) models and prevent unauthorized redistribution. In this work, we reveal a previously unexplored systematic vulnerability in existing generative model fingerprinting methods: they lack robustness against collusion attacks, where multiple attackers combine their models to remove or obscure the fingerprints. To address this issue, we take the first step towards a robust fingerprinting method for T2I models with anti-collusion capabilities. The proposed method encodes strings of bits, namely fingerprints, into the coefficients of a personalized normalization module (PNM) incorporated into T2I models, so that fingerprints can be reliably recovered from any generated image. To defend against collusion attacks and prevent unauthorized model redistribution, we introduce an anti-collusion mechanism based on lossless function-invariant parameter transformations. This mechanism significantly degrades the image generation quality of colluded models, making them effectively unusable. Moreover, our method allows developers to efficiently create multiple copies of fingerprinted T2I models by reparameterizing the PNM without the need for retraining. We also introduce a worst-case optimization strategy to improve robustness against model-level attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high fidelity and robustness across multiple T2I image generation and editing tasks, with fingerprint extraction accuracy exceeding 99.5%. Compared with existing methods, our method demonstrates, for the first time, a notable proactive robustness to collusion attacks by significantly increasing the FID of colluded models.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A systematic imputation framework for sparse, multimodal space biology datasets: application to retinal imaging and omics from the RR9 mission

Space biology experiments are expensive, logistically complex, and inherently limited in sample size, resulting in datasets that are frequently incomplete and highly heterogeneous (2). Missing data is a fundamental barrier to building reliable computational models of how the human body responds to spaceflight. This work introduces a systematic framework for addressing missing data through imputation. We developed a validated four-stage framework for imputation specifically designed to preserve biological signal needed for digital twin development, while quantifying trade-offs in downstream analyses. Using retinal imaging and omics data from the NASA RR9 mission as a case study (9), we demonstrate how to diagnose why data is missing(10), select and optimize appropriate imputation strategies (5,10), and rigorously evaluate whether imputed data remains biologically meaningful. A key finding of this work is that while imputation substantially improves the performance of predictive models, it can simultaneously obscure subtle biological patterns; a critical trade-off that researchers must understand before applying these methods (11). This framework provides practical, actionable guidance for space biologists and data scientists working with sparse, multimodal datasets in space biology, and represents a foundational step toward more complete and reliable data-driven models of human physiology in extreme environments.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

IAPO: Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization for Tool Use in Small Multimodal Agents

arXiv:2606.11652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates reinforcement learning (RL) methods for improving tool-calling capabilities in multimodal small language model (SLM) agents. While existing works have explored various reward designs to improve agentic tool-calling ability, these approaches face inherent limitations for SLM training, especially under multimodal scenarios. First, many existing methods evaluate tool use correctness through exact matching against certain ground-truth or predefined formats. However, this assumption is often unsuitable for multimodal tasks, where multiple tool use paths may be valid and annotated tool trajectories are typically unavailable. Second, such sparse and brittle binary rewards provide little guidance on how to improve the underlying decision process, making them particularly difficult for multimodal SLM to learn from. To address these issues, we propose Input Attribution-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), an RL algorithm for improving tool use in multimodal SLM by aligning the model's attribution across input components with that of a stronger teacher. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-3B show that the proposed method improves visual question answering accuracy by an average of 3% across six test sets compared with existing visual tool use work, by helping the model attend to the most relevant input evidence.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Metastatic Patterns and Treatment Characteristics of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer in Nigeria: A Retrospective Cohort Study

Background: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype characterized by the absence of estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 expression. It is associated with limited targeted treatment options, early relapse, and a high propensity for visceral metastasis. Data describing metastatic patterns and treatment characteristics of TNBC in Nigeria remain limited. Methods: This retrospective descriptive cohort study included 869 patients with TNBC managed at the Medserve-LUTH Cancer Center, Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria between June 2019 and June 2024. Demographic, clinicopathologic, metastatic, and treatment-related data were extracted from electronic medical records. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize patient characteristics, metastatic patterns, and treatment profiles. Associations between metastatic disease and selected clinicopathologic and treatment variables were explored using Pearsons chi-square test. Complete-case analysis was applied throughout. Results: The mean age at presentation was 52.09 {+/-} 12.26 years. Most patients were married (79.1%), postmenopausal (64.3%), and of Yoruba ethnicity (56.8%). Advanced disease predominated, with Stage III and Stage IV disease accounting for 42.9% and 35.6% of cases, respectively. Invasive ductal carcinoma was the most common histologic subtype (77.0%), while Grade II tumours constituted 51.3% of graded cases. Surgery was performed in 73.1% of patients, predominantly mastectomy (70.9% of surgical procedures). Chemotherapy was administered to 83.2% of patients, most commonly anthracycline-based regimens (41.8%), while radiotherapy was delivered to 63.5% of patients, with hypofractionated schedules of 42-43 Gy in 15-16 fractions accounting for 47.2% of radiotherapy courses. Metastatic disease was documented in 32.9% of evaluable patients. Lung metastasis was the most frequent site (62.5%), followed by bone (46.3%), regional lymph node invasion (38.5%), liver (23.0%), and brain (22.6%). Tumour grade and histologic subtype were not significantly associated with metastatic disease, whereas radiotherapy exposure demonstrated a significant association with metastatic status ({chi}{superscript 2} = 10.35, p = 0.001). Conclusion: TNBC in this Nigerian cohort was characterized by advanced-stage presentation, invasive ductal predominance, extensive use of multimodality treatment, and substantial visceral metastatic burden. Lung metastasis was the most common metastatic site. These findings provide contemporary real-world data on TNBC in Nigeria and highlight the continuing need for earlier diagnosis, timely referral, and sustained investment in comprehensive cancer care services.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Retrospective Progress-Aware Self-Refinement for LLM Agent Training

LLM-based agents trained with reinforcement learning optimize step-wise action prediction but lack metacognitive awareness of task progress, inducing a gap that hinders long-horizon scaling. A pilot study reveals that online progress prompting hurts performance while retrospective demonstrations help, yet this capability cannot emerge from outcome-reward training alone. We present RePro, Retrospective Progress-Aware Training, a framework that trains agents to self-generate progress signals via a forward-then-reflect rollout paradigm: the agent executes actions online, then retrospectively reassesses its step-wise progress given the completed trajectory and known outcome. RePro initializes with a Retrospection Warmup that teaches reflection format from minimal external demonstrations, then further trains through RePro-PO with a composite reward that produces self-generated signals without continuous external supervision. Experiments on WebShop, ALFWorld, and Sokoban show that RePro enhances the Qwen family's performance, with up to $12\%$ absolute success rate gains.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

This Guideline presents a systematic and operationalizable annotation framework for representing legal argumentation structures in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and provide a reliable foundation for computational analysis. At the element level, the Guideline distinguishes between the non-propositional layer and the propositional layer. The non-propositional layer consists of two elements: Issue and Non-argumentative Component. At the propositional level, the Guideline defines four proposition types: General Normative Judgment, Particular Normative Judgment, General Factual Judgment, and Particular Factual Judgment. At the relational level, five relation types are defined to represent argumentative structures: Support, Attack, Joint, Match, and Identity. These relations capture positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, correspondences between legal norms and case facts, and identity or semantic equivalence between propositions. The Guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent visualization of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this Guideline supports large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

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

Phys-JEPA: Physics-Informed Latent World Models for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate forecasting in physical systems requires models that predict coupled temporal variables while preserving meaningful state evolution. Deep forecasters can fit temporal correlations, and physics-informed models can regularize predictions with scientific constraints, but these directions are often connected only at the decoded-output level. As a result, the hidden predictive state that generates future trajectories may remain statistically useful but physically unstructured. We introduce Phys-JEPA, a physics-informed joint-embedding predictive architecture for multivariate time-series forecasting. Phys-JEPA learns a latent world model in which predictive states are decomposed into physical and residual components, and physical consistency is imposed directly on latent states and latent transitions rather than only on decoded forecasts. This formulation uses known physical variables to organize the representation space while retaining residual capacity for unresolved dynamics. On Jena Climate 2009–2016, Phys-JEPA reduces aggregate MSE from 0.12482 to 0.12273 and temperature MSE from 0.01892 to 0.01831 at H=24. On Traffic, full Phys-JEPA improves aggregate MSE over the supervised baseline across all tested horizons, reducing H=192 MSE from 0.800784 to 0.773873. On Electricity, the best variant depends on horizon: static latent consistency is strongest at H=24 and H=48, while full Phys-JEPA gives the best aggregate and target-variable MSE at H=192. These initial results suggest that moving physics-informed learning from output space to latent predictive state space is a promising direction for interpretable temporal world models.

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

Recursive Scaling in Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.18022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequence generation. Scaling MDMs is conventionally achieved by increasing the parameter count or the number of denoising steps. We introduce Recursive Masked Diffusion Models (R-MDMs), which add recursive depth as a third scaling axis by repeatedly applying the same denoising transformer within each diffusion step. Recursion enables iterative refinement of the output through parameter reuse, increasing effective model depth without increasing parameter count. Across structured generation tasks, including Sudoku and Countdown, we show that R-MDMs achieve substantially improved parameter efficiency: a model with $L$ recursive iterations often matches the performance of non-recursive baselines with roughly $L\times$ more parameters. Moreover, recursive refinement can partially substitute for additional denoising steps, allowing recursive models to reach the same generation quality with fewer forward passes at inference time. These results suggest that recursive depth is a practically useful scaling mechanism for MDMs, improving both parameter efficiency and the allocation of test-time compute.

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

Bound State Solutions of the Relativistic Finite-difference Equation for the Ring-shaped Quesne Oscillator Potential

arXiv:2606.12082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We solve exactly the relativistic finite-difference equation for the quantum three-dimensional ring-shaped Quesne oscillator potential. Our investigation is based on a finite-difference version of relativistic quantum mechanics. So-called relativistic configurational r-space is a key concept here. We show that the radial wavefunctions and angular wavefunctions are expressed through the continuous dual Hahn polynomials and Jacobi polynomials, respectively. A discrete energy spectrum has been found. The radial wave functions and energy spectrum have the correct nonrelativistic limit. We also build a dynamical symmetry group SU (1, 1) for the radial part of the equation of motion, which allows us to find the energy spectrum purely algebraically.

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

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

SANA: What Matters for QA Agents over Massive Data Lakes?

Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results. End-to-end accuracy alone cannot distinguish failures in search, planning, data analysis, or the agent's Action Policy: its decisions about what to do next and when to submit an answer. We present SANA (Search Agent Navigation Ablation framework), a diagnostic ablation framework that transforms EQA tasks into runtime profiles containing gold source sequence, sanitized subquestions, and execution records. SANA uses these profiles to construct idealized search, planning, and data-analysis tools, allowing each component to be ablated; the residual gap is diagnostic evidence for policy failures. To illustrate SANA as a reusable evaluation framework, we adapted two recent EQA benchmarks, LakeQA and KramaBench, and evaluated lightweight and mid-sized agents under fixed prompts, budgets, data lakes, and runtimes. Across both benchmarks, data analysis is a consistent bottleneck while planning is less so. Search is a major limitation in LakeQA's large data-lake setting, but less so for the smaller-scale KramaBench. SANA thus deconstructs end-to-end task accuracies into a diagnosis of where data-lake agents fail, and allows for systematic comparisons of progress in search, planning, data analysis, and agent design.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Nickel and Dimed: How a Common Earth Element is Short-Changing Our Health

Nickel has been studied for a long time as an environmental contaminant but less so in its connection to population health. It does not announce itself as loudly as its transition metal brethren like mercury and cadmium, but its chemical properties permit it to be deleterious as a low-dose, chronic exposure, particularly among those with immune systems sensitized to it. There is a growing evidence base and vocabulary to discuss nickel's affect on health. However, in the U.S., there are not recent, reliable estimates of the share of the population with a nickel allergy, let alone how much nickel Americans are exposed to through their diet. This paper seeks to close this evidence gap by creating a new dataset of dietary nickel and other heavy metal exposure and assessing how high levels of dietary nickel exposure shape local demand for health care services. We use soil data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data on agricultural product transport from FoodFlows.org to create a county-level dietary nickel exposure index. We then use a large electronic health record database and double machine learning to estimate how demand for primary care services varies across levels of dietary nickel exposure. We find that counties with high nickel exposure experience an increase in the share of primary care office visits for symptoms highly suggestive of nickel poisoning. This result survives multiple hypothesis test corrections and placebo tests. Our research suggests that nickel has harmful effects on individual health whose exposure can be measured at a population level, and is shaping primary care across the U.S.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

作者:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

Measurement Geometry for Quantum Random Access Codes: Beyond Nayak Bound and Toward Optimality

arXiv:2606.12700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum random access codes (QRACs) ask how well N classical bits can be encoded into M qubits while allowing any single bit to be recovered. Although the Nayak bound remains the standard general upper bound on the decoding probability, numerical evidence suggests a stronger upper bound in the small-qubit regime. In this work, we formulate the optimal decoding probability in terms of decoding measurements, reformulating QRAC design as a spectral problem for noncommuting measurements. Using this formulation, we give an elementary proof of the Nayak bound by simplifying the Chernoff-bound argument. Moreover, we refine the argument to obtain upper bounds that improve over Nayak's bound in the entire finite-size regime. The equality conditions of our bounds justify defining mutually unbiased projector-valued measurements (MUPVMs), a generalization of mutually unbiased bases. We show that decoding measurement of any two-qubit QRAC attaining the conjectured bound must form MUPVMs. We also show that any MUPVM, assisted by one ancillary qubit, yields a QRAC with optimal N-scaling decoding probability. Finally, we propose a new MUPVM-based construction for the (M+2,M)-QRAC family attaining the conjectured bound.