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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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

Private Learning with Public Feature Conditioning

arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

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

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

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

RegimeVGGT: Layer-Wise Spatially Preserving Redundancy Removal for Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) recovers dense 3D scene structure from multi-view images in one forward pass, but quadratic cross-frame attention limits its scalability. Existing training-free accelerators reduce computation uniformly along one axis, missing layer heterogeneity. Our spectral, probing, and causal analyses reveal three regimes: shallow layers lack cross-view structure, middle layers drive cross-view alignment, and deep layers are redundant for dense geometry yet their cross-frame attention remains essential for pose. RegimeVGGT applies layer-wise U-shaped compression along two axes: Saliency-Guided Banded Merging protects geometry- and edge-salient tokens, while Selectively Protected K/V Downsampling preserves cross-frame spatial coverage and the pose-critical path through a phase-shifted spatial grid, a reference-frame anchor, and uncompressed camera/register tokens. Training-free, RegimeVGGT achieves a 6.7x speedup over VGGT* at matched reconstruction quality.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PersonaDrive: Human-Style Retrieval-Augmented VLA Agents for Closed-Loop Driving Simulation

Closed-loop driving simulators typically populate their environments with non-ego traffic agents that behave largely the same way, produced either by rule-based traffic managers or by learned models trained toward a single behavioral mode. Recent work introduces style variation through post-hoc labels on observational data or LLM-inferred reward weights, but these signals act as proxies for what a style should reward rather than demonstrations of humans explicitly asked to drive in that style. We introduce PersonaDrive, a pipeline that conditions a vision-language-action (VLA) driving agent on retrieved demonstrations from a style-instructed human driving dataset, in which participants drive CARLA leaderboard routes under aggressive, neutral, and conservative instructions on a driver-in-the-loop rig. The pipeline has three stages: (i) offline triplet mining over per-style human driving data using a combined image-text similarity score; (ii) training a lightweight retrieval head that fuses frozen visual features with a small control encoder over per-style databases; and (iii) fine-tuning a single VLA backbone to treat retrieved context points as in-context behavioral demonstrations during waypoint prediction. At inference, the same backbone is conditioned on any style by swapping which per-style database the retrieval head queries, so selecting a style requires no per-style retraining while enabling human-style, style-diverse non-ego agents for closed-loop simulation. On Bench2Drive, PersonaDrive (no style) improves the driving score by 4.6% over SimLingo and 2.5% over HiP-AD, and under style conditioning attains the highest driving score in every style within a roughly 2% band (its weakest style surpassing the strongest baseline, DMW, by 5.4%), while average speed and acceleration rise by 18% and 25% from the conservative to the aggressive instruction.

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

Mind the Gap: Diagnosing Constraint Discovery Failures in Text-in-Image Editing

作者:

A key challenge in multimodal reasoning is determining which visual dependencies become relevant under a specific task, rather than merely recognizing visible content. We study this through edit-induced constraint discovery in text-in-image editing, a controlled diagnostic setting where a local text change can activate secondary consistency constraints: given a valid editing instruction and an image, can a model identify the secondary regions that must also change? Across 461 diagnostic cases, four MLLMs, and 19 constraint subtypes, models recover only 46% case-level macro recall under unguided prompting versus 94% when constraints are explicitly provided, suggesting that a substantial portion of the failure arises when models must decide which unstated dependencies to surface. Oracle-field decomposition shows that case-specific causal explanations are the most effective partial guidance (0.782 recall), above region names (0.610) or type labels (0.646), suggesting that edit-specific causal cues account for much of the oracle gain. A downstream experiment further shows that higher self-discovery recall does not necessarily improve task performance: unverified self-discovery introduces false positives that offset recall gains, motivating precision-aware constraint elicitation.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

One Transit Is All You Need: Detecting Exoplanets Through Learned Stellar Behaviour with EXOVEIL

arXiv:2606.02778v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees. Unlike existing systems that require phase-folded input, EXOVEIL operates on raw flux time series and can detect planets that transit only once.A Transformer world model, trained on 16,499 Kepler light curves with transit-masked self-supervised learning, predicts expected stellar flux. A matched-filter detector with variance weighting extracts transit signals from the prediction residuals. A learned classifier (XGBoost) separates planets from false positives, achieving AUC 0.938 on Kepler DR25. Applied to single-transit injection-recovery, EXOVEIL recovers 32% of transits at 1000 ppm depth a task where all classification-based systems score 0% by construction. A blind search of 3,737 Kepler stars yields 179 new transit-like signals not present in the DR25 TCE catalogue, including 46 monotransit candidates. Applied withoutretraining to 47 confirmed TESS planets in the PLATO LOPS2 field, EXOVEIL achieves 100% recovery, demonstrating zero-shot cross-mission transfer. At PLATO's 25-second cadence, detection reaches 100 ppm – approaching the Earth-analog regime. I provide the first application of conformal prediction to transit detection (95.9% empirical coverage) and release the system as pip install exoveil with pretrained weights and a candidate catalogue.

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

PhysDrift: Bridging the Embodiment Gap in Humanoid Co-Speech Motion Generation

arXiv:2606.19935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots require co-speech motions that are not only expressive and speech-aligned, but also physically executable under embodiment constraints. Existing co-speech generation pipelines are predominantly human-centric: motions are first generated in human-body representations such as SMPL-X and subsequently retargeted to humanoid robots. In this work, we identify a fundamental embodiment gap in this paradigm, where the mismatch between human motion manifolds and humanoid embodiment constraints disrupts embodiment consistency during motion transfer and physical execution. Through extensive analysis, we show that although retargeting can preserve coarse motion semantics, it significantly compresses motion diversity and weakens prosody-motion synchronization, limiting expressive humanoid behaviors. To address this problem, we first propose IK-EER, a prosody-preserving humanoid motion curation framework that jointly optimizes kinematic feasibility and speech-motion temporal alignment during retargeting. Building upon the curated robot-native motion dataset, we further introduce PhysDrift, an embodiment-aware co-speech motion generation framework that directly predicts executable humanoid joint trajectories from speech without relying on intermediate human-body representations. Unlike conventional human-centric pipelines, PhysDrift maintains embodiment consistency throughout both training and inference while incorporating physical regularization to stabilize robot motion dynamics. Extensive experiments and real-world humanoid deployment demonstrate that embodiment-aware robot-native generation substantially improves speech-motion alignment, physical plausibility, motion smoothness, inference efficiency, and real-time interaction capability.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Application and quantum properties of superpositions of oppositely squeezed states

arXiv:2511.03204v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that superpositions of oppositely squeezed states – non-Gaussian Schr{\"{o}}dinger-cat-like states – exhibit enhanced nonclassical features and provide an entanglement advantage in the small-squeezing regime. These states possess photon-number structures distinct from conventional coherent-state cat states, and we analyze their Wigner functions and the entanglement generated when they are injected into a 50-50 beam splitter. As a practical application, we demonstrate that they enable a high-quality heralded single-photon source whose second-order intensity correlation function is smaller than that obtained from a pure two-mode squeezed vacuum state. We further propose a linear-optical heralding scheme that approximates these superpositions without requiring strong Kerr nonlinearities. Our results indicate that the superposition of oppositely squeezed states is a promising non-Gaussian resource for quantum information processing, particularly for single-photon generation.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

作者:

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

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

A theoretical model for task routing in mixture-of-expert transformers

arXiv:2606.14398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers enable the scaling of transformer models while keeping the inference compute fixed. While task-expert specialization has been observed in empirical studies of frontier MoE transformer models, existing theoretical work analyzes this using continuous mixture models that cannot be used to model natural language effectively. An important open question is to theoretically explain task-expert specialization in transformer MoE models using discrete models of language. To address this, we represent structured knowledge via syntactic templates and finite key-value dictionaries, and prove formally that a single-layer MoE transformer can encode knowledge by using experts that specialize in the corresponding tasks. Our construction shows how queries are routed to unique, task-specific experts whose size depends solely on the intrinsic complexity of the given task (i.e. the combined size of its syntactic templates and factual dictionary). Our construction provides a theoretical support for empirical results on localized knowledge circuits in MoE models. We support our theoretical findings with experiments evaluating model performance under varying MoE loss functions.

18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

作者: 未知作者

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

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

Mental Health AI Safety Claims Must Preserve Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2605.08827v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Reliable and Scalable Lemon Leaf Disease Classification

Early detection of plant diseases is crucial to plants and for the farmers. Plant diseases reduce fruit yield and quality, and plants are more susceptible to other stresses when they are infected. The lemon leaf disease dataset contains 1354 images. The dataset has 9 classes. Among the 9 classes only one class is for healthy leaf, and the other 8 classes are leaf diseases. The dataset was split into training (70%), testing (15%) and validation (15%) sets after comprehensive preprocessing. Two pretrained models (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) were applied and then combined these models using an ensemble technique to boost robustness. Ensemble models showed a promising performance of 99.27% accuracy. Adversarial Training is applied to improve models' ability and ensure reliable predictions under noisy data. Grad-CAM visualization highlights the important regions of leaf images that validate the model prediction with confidence level.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the Redundancy of Timestep Embeddings in Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.20416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models rely heavily on explicit timestep embeddings to modulate the denoising process across various noise scales. In this work, we challenge the necessity of these temporal signals by analyzing their impact on U-Net and Diffusion Transformer architectures. Beyond empirical evidence, we provide a theoretical framework demonstrating that, under certain conditions, the global minimizer of the diffusion training objective can be achieved without explicit timestep conditioning. Our findings reveal a surprising robustness when timestep embeddings are completely removed. Extensive ablation studies on the CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets show that these time-agnostic models can maintain high structural fidelity and even surpass their conditioned counterparts in competitive metrics, including FID, precision, and recall. Our analysis suggests these architectures can implicitly infer noise scales from the corrupted input under specific assumptions, rendering explicit temporal conditioning redundant. This study challenges long-standing temporal conditioning paradigms and paves the way for more efficient and structurally focused generative architectures.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Gaussian Mixture Attention: Linear-Time Sequence Mixing via Probabilistic Latent Routing

arXiv:2606.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dense token-to-token interaction pattern of standard dot-product attention remains a central bottleneck in scaling Transformer architectures to long contexts. We introduce Gaussian Mixture Attention (GMA), a probabilistic attention-style sequence mixer that replaces explicit pairwise query–key comparison with routing through $K$ learned Gaussian mixture components. Queries and keys are mapped to posterior responsibility vectors over a shared latent routing space; their overlap defines an implicit responsibility-space affinity, while values are written into and read from a $K$-slot latent memory. By exploiting the associativity of matrix multiplication, GMA avoids materializing the induced $N\times N$ affinity matrix and instead uses two responsibility matrices whose dominant activation storage scales as $\mathcal{O}(NK)$ rather than $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ for fixed $K$. We formulate bidirectional and causal variants of GMA, provide an end-to-end differentiable parameterization of the Gaussian mixture components, and analyze its responsibility-modulated gradient structure, constrained non-negative low-rank affinity interpretation, and local routing stability. Empirically, GMA exhibits the intended fixed-$K$ linear memory scaling and is competitive with attention-style baselines on long-context classification, while causal GMA improves over tested linear/random-feature attention variants on WikiText-103 but remains behind optimized causal SDPA and Mamba in the current implementation. Analysis of learned responsibilities further shows broad component usage and moderate alignment with surface-form token categories, supporting GMA as a probabilistic, interpretable, fixed-$K$ linear-time attention-style alternative rather than a universal replacement for optimized softmax attention or state-space models.

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

It's About Time: Temporal References in Emergent Communication

Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. A minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis shows that over 95% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improving Medical Communication using Rubric-Guided Counterfactual Recommendations

Text-based telemedicine increasingly relies on lightweight patient feedback, however, such feedback primarily reflects perceived communication quality rather than medical accuracy. We introduce an LM-guided counterfactual recommendation pipeline that discovers and refines interpretable communication features such as tone, personalization, actionability and completeness in addressing patient concerns, without interfering with the medical content. These features are used together with patient-doctor interaction metadata to estimate positive feedback. At inference time, the system searches over low-cost ordinal feature changes and recommends minimal communication changes predicted to increase the probability of positive feedback, while independent auditor models test whether these gains generalize beyond the selection model. Across interactions, recommendations yield a mean +6.41% gain in predicted positive feedback probability under independent auditors, and are non-negative for 93.31% of recommendations. These results suggest that small, interpretable communication changes can capture most predicted gains while preserving the doctor's control over medical reasoning and final wording.