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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Scalable Graph State Generation with O(1) Local Feedforward in Quantum Networks

arXiv:2606.16375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of quantum networks faces a key challenge: the contradiction between probabilistic long-range entanglement generation and finite coherence time. Existing routing protocols typically focus on global state computation or path optimization. As the network scales up, classical delays accumulate and exacerbate decoherence, leading to a decrease in entanglement fidelity. To reduce routing decision delays to levels far below the coherence time of qubits, we propose a protocol based on local measurement and classical feedforward. This protocol reduces the local decision complexity to amortized O(1) level, ensuring that the decision delay is always much smaller than the coherence time of qubits. We map this protocol onto a dual-species trapped-ion platform and perform hybrid simulations. The results show that the proposed protocol performs well in terms of both resource efficiency and time feasibility. Noise analysis indicates that readout fidelity is the main bottleneck of this protocol, but noise suppression can be achieved by employing an erasure transformation in the dual-species architecture, combined with spatial multiplexing and branch independence, thereby ensuring the generation of high-fidelity star subgraphs. This protocol provides a clear path to achieving high-fidelity star subgraphs. These subgraphs can serve as general modules, merging to construct arbitrary subgraphs, providing a feasible solution for future fault-tolerant distributed quantum computing.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeXposure-Claw: An Agentic System for DeFi Risk Supervision

Decentralized finance exposes supervisors to fast-moving, networked credit risks. General-purpose LLM agents fit this setting poorly: they over-read weak evidence and recommend high-stakes interventions, while existing evaluations offer no regulator-aligned way to measure the resulting false alarms. We introduce DeXposure-Claw, a forecast-grounded agentic supervision system that routes LLM decisions through structured evidence: (1) DeXposure-FM, a graph time-series foundation model, forecasts future exposure networks; (2) deterministic monitors and stress scenarios then turn those forecasts into typed alerts, attribution signals, and scenario evidence; and (3) data-health and confidence gates constrain escalation before DeXposure-Claw emits auditable supervisory tickets with rationales. We further develop DeXposure-Bench, a six-axis evaluation harness, whose decision axis scores tickets against a regulator-aligned absolute-loss ground truth and an explicit false-intervention rate. Experiments on five years of weekly real data fully support our system. Code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/DeXposure-Claw.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gaming-Resistant Insurance Contracts for Autonomous AI Agents: Strategy-Proof Toll Mechanism Design

arXiv:2606.16326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Paper A defines a time-consistent actuarial runtime that prices each side-effect-bearing action against a contractually fixed safe default and gates execution against a reserve budget. It treats the operator as passive. This paper makes the operator strategic. We characterise a five-attack space for autonomous AI-agent insurance contracts and prove when the actuarial runtime is gaming-resistant. Two attack surfaces – post-toll safe-default selection and within-boundary action splitting – are closed by Paper A's minimal-authority and no-splitting clauses. The remaining three require new contract clauses. First, common-control aggregation prevents cross-boundary re-routing from reducing toll below the boundary potential applied to total exposure. Second, interface failures such as invalid JSON are contract-relevant events, not safety wins: treating them as zero-toll safe defaults can reward unreliable models, while escalation fees reverse the incentive. We validate this interface-compliance theorem on committed cross-model traces from the companion empirical paper. Third, a model-identity menu with a componentwise-minimum penalty schedule makes truthful reporting of the deployed model weakly dominant. We then compose these clauses with Paper A's runtime guarantees to obtain joint incentive compatibility over the five-attack space. Finally, a two-parameter premium family discharges operator individual rationality and weak budget balance at the truthful equilibrium. The result is an incentive-compatibility layer for actuarial control of autonomous-agent side effects.

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

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

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

Self-Guidance: Enhancing Neural Codecs via Decoder Manifold Alignment

arXiv:2606.12940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural speech codecs based on Vector-Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs) are core audio tokenizers for speech LLMs, yet their reconstruction fidelity is bottlenecked by quantization error. Modifying the quantizer or increasing model capacity are common fixes, but they complicate downstream language modeling. Our core idea is to align the decoder's internal feature manifolds when processing both the quantized tokens and their original continuous embeddings, using a lightweight feature-mapping loss. This requires minimal training overhead and no inference-time changes. Applied to XCodec2, self-guidance improves all reconstruction metrics, achieving state-of-the-art low-bitrate performance. Notably, it enables a 4x codebook reduction without fidelity loss, which downstream TTS experiments show significantly improves LLM-based synthesis by simplifying the token modeling space. Multiple statistical observations and visualizations corroborate the enhanced internal manifold alignment in the decoder. Extensive experiments confirm its generality across various inductive biases. Self-guidance thus establishes an efficient, broadly applicable method for high-fidelity neural audio coding.

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

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning via Label Refinement and Threshold Adjustment

arXiv:2407.05370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms often struggle to perform well when trained on imbalanced data. In such scenarios, the generated pseudo-labels tend to exhibit a bias toward the majority class, and models relying on these pseudo-labels can further amplify this bias. Existing imbalanced SSL algorithms explore pseudo-labeling strategies based on either pseudo-label refinement (PLR) or threshold adjustment (THA), aiming to mitigate the bias through heuristic-driven designs. However, through a careful statistical analysis, we find that existing strategies are suboptimal: most PLR algorithms are either overly empirical or rely on the unrealistic assumption that models remain well-calibrated throughout training, while most THA algorithms depend on flawed metrics for pseudo-label selection. To address these shortcomings, we first derive the theoretically optimal form of pseudo-labels under class imbalance. This foundation leads to our key contribution: SEmi-supervised learning with pseudo-label optimization based on VALidation data (SEVAL), a unified framework that learns both PLR and THA parameters from a class-balanced subset of training data. By jointly optimizing these components, SEVAL adapts to specific task requirements while ensuring per-class pseudo-label reliability. Our experiments demonstrate that SEVAL outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods, producing more accurate and effective pseudo-labels across various imbalanced SSL scenarios while remaining compatible with diverse SSL algorithms. The code is publicly available (https://github.com/ZerojumpLine/SEVAL).

09.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-22

Affordable centimeter-scale 3D microscopy with submicrometer resolution

作者: 未知作者

Submicrometer-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of large samples has been constrained by the short working distance, high cost and inflexible design of immersion objectives. We developed hybrid solid–liquid optics (HySIL) — a refractive framework with index-matched components — for submicrometer-resolution 3D imaging of centimeter-scale samples in various immersion media using inexpensive air objectives.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Filum Terminale Diameter on Routine Pediatric MRI: A Large-Cohort Clinical Reference in 3,406 Children and the Age-Dependent Meaning of the 2-mm Thickened-Filum Threshold

Background. A filum diameter >2 mm is the conventional MRI threshold for a thickened filum, but it derives from small, mostly adult series showing no age dependence; whether one cutoff suits all of childhood is untested. Objective. To build an age-specific filum-diameter reference on routine pediatric MRI and test, adjusting for image resolution, whether the 2-mm threshold is age-stationary. Materials and methods. In this retrospective study an nnU-Net tracer measured the maximal filum diameter on consecutive lumbosacral MRI; versus manual tracing it showed negligible bias but moderate single-measure agreement. After excluding report-confirmed fatty filum, lipoma, or tethered cord, the proportion >2 mm was analysed within one acquisition protocol and by logistic regression adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness. Results. Of 7,245 examinations, 3,869 (53%) were traceable; untraced ones were younger (median 0.75 vs 2.0 years). The presumed-normal cohort had median diameter 1.48 mm. At matched resolution, 2 mm marked the 94th percentile in infants (5.6% exceeded it) but the 83rd by 3-6 years (17.4%); the age effect persisted after adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness (3-6 years vs infants, adjusted OR 4.7; P < .001). Conclusion. Filum diameter clusters near 1.5 mm, and the fixed 2-mm cutoff flags ~5% of infants but ~17% of preschoolers. Caliber should be judged against an age-specific clinical reference, not one fixed cutoff; a thick filum is not itself a diagnosis of tethered cord.

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

When Does Language Matter? Multilingual Instructions Reveal Step-wise Language Sensitivity in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to linguistic variation remains poorly understood. In this work, we present the first systematic multilingual evaluation of VLA models by translating the LIBERO benchmark into ten languages, revealing severe performance degradation under non-English instructions, with success rates dropping by 30-50%. Through fine-grained analysis of task executions, we find that language influence is highly non-uniform across steps: certain steps exhibit strong language dependence and dominate overall task failure, while others are largely language-agnostic. Based on this insight, we propose a step-wise inference-time intervention that aligns representations according to step language sensitivity, substantially improving performance under linguistic variation. Our results indicate that language robustness in VLA models is fundamentally a step-wise control problem, highlighting the importance of temporally structured analysis for reliable embodied agents.

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

AI Coding Agents in Social Science: Methodologically Diverse, Empirically Consistent, Interpretively Vulnerable

The deployment of LLM-based agents in scientific analysis raises opposing concerns: that agents may reduce methodological diversity, or that they may amplify the analytic flexibility through which researchers reach motivated conclusions. We argue these worries target two empirically separable layers: a design layer of methodological choices, and a verdict layer in which a decision rule maps estimates to a substantive claim. We test both by running 20 independent executions of Claude Code and Codex on a prominent immigration and social-policy against a many-analysts human baseline. At the design layer, Codex matches human methodological diversity and Claude Code produces nearly three times as many specifications; both agents' effect estimates remain broadly aligned with the human consensus, and no agent model exactly matches any human model. A prompt-induced anti-immigration researcher prior reorganizes each agent's methodological decisions but, unlike for biased human analysts in the same data, does not shift aggregate estimates or final verdicts; nor do agents reroute along the methodological axes humans use to bias their estimates. At the verdict layer, an explicit confirmatory prompt flips Claude Code's verdicts from 10% to 90% support while leaving its coefficient distribution essentially unchanged, operating through rule omission rather than rule softening. AI agents can rival or exceed human methodological diversity at the design layer while remaining vulnerable at the verdict layer. In our setting, the locus of AI bias is not estimation but interpretation.

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

CABLE: Cloud-Assisted Bandwidth-efficient LMM-based Encoding for V2X Systems

Cloud-hosted large multimodal models (LMMs) can provide strong open-vocabulary perception for Vehicle-to-Everything systems, but naively transmitting full-resolution frames from edge to cloud causes severe communication overhead and high cloud-side prefill latency. We present CABLE, a cloud-assisted bandwidth-efficient LMM-based encoding framework for edge-cloud perception. CABLE propagates the previous cloud segmentation mask on the edge using ego-motion compensation, refines it with residual-motion cues, and consolidates disconnected regions via a corridor envelope to form a robust region of interest (ROI). Only ROI-masked images are uploaded, while the cloud segmentation output is fed back as the prior for the next frame, forming a mask-to-ROI-to-LMM feedback loop. Experiments on five datasets (nuScenes, WOD-ZB, Waymo, KITTI, and CADC) show consistent communication savings while largely preserving perception, achieving $73$–$87\%$ ROI pixel-coverage reduction with $5$–$8\times$ estimated LMM prefill speedup at a modest detection-quality trade-off relative to full-frame inference.

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

FreoStream:Enhancing Stream Guardrails via Future-Aware Reasoning and Safety-Aligned Optimization

arXiv:2606.13737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stream guardrails enable token-level safety detection before full responses are generated. However, they often make overly conservative judgements and block those sensitive but safe tokens, which is known as over-refusal. Due to lack of full context, they also fail to detect implicitly harmful content from jailbreaking. To address these challenges, we propose FreoStream, a novel streaming guardrail framework. Specifically, FreoStream fine-tunes a LoRA module to perform Future-Aware Reasoning when the base guardrail detects unsafe tokens. The reasoning process follows a Future-Reason-Judge paradigm: predict the future, reason about the full context and give the final judgement. This design can effectively reduce over-refusal by incorporating the future information. Moreover, we introduce the Safety-Aligned Optimization module that extracts the safety-aligned component from the reasoning gradients to update the base guardrail model, thereby enhancing streaming safety detection. Extensive experiments on various safety benchmarks demonstrate that FreoStream achieves lower over-refusal rates and better jailbreak defense compared to existing streaming guardrails.

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

Agentic Electronic Design Automation: A Handoff Perspective

arXiv:2606.19795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electronic design automation (EDA) is inherently multi-stage and handoff-heavy. Design artifacts, flow scripts, and engineering decisions cross tool, session, and organizational boundaries before final implementation, signoff, or release. Each transfer carries explicit and implicit requirements that may not be fully captured by stage-local checks. LLM-based agents now invoke EDA tools directly, embed retrieved knowledge in executable scripts, and hand off state across sessions and stages. Once their outputs condition downstream engineering decisions, the transferred object must satisfy a handoff contract and meet the assumptions of its next consumer. This survey introduces handoff validity as its organizing principle. A handoff is valid when the transferred object satisfies the consumer's acceptance conditions and carries sufficient context, evidence, and provenance for downstream use. We review 82 systems and classify them into three boundary classes. Stage-Bound systems establish validity within a single EDA stage or bounded verification task. Flow-Bound systems preserve coherent workflow state across tools, invocations, and sessions. Organization-Bound systems maintain source grounding, provenance, scope, and admissibility across knowledge and authority boundaries. For each class, we analyze handoff contracts, handoff objects, coordination mechanisms, and open questions. These analyses motivate a five-layer EDA agent communication protocol (EACP), covering the agent discovery, agent message, tool invocation, workflow orchestration, and security and IP protocols. We aim to provide a common vocabulary and research agenda for trustworthy agentic EDA.

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

MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks, including adaptive strategies specifically designed to bypass existing defenses. To address this vulnerability, we propose MirrorCheck, a robust and model-agnostic detection framework that operates effectively in both unimodal and multimodal settings. MirrorCheck leverages Text-to-Image (T2I) models to regenerate visual content from captions produced by the target model and assesses semantic consistency by comparing feature-space embeddings between the original and synthesized images. To enhance robustness against adaptive attacks, MirrorCheck introduces a stochastic defense strategy that randomly selects T2I generators and image encoders from a diverse model zoo. Additionally, we incorporate a novel One-Time-Use (OTU) perturbation applied to the selected encoder embeddings, regulated by a scaling factor, which decreases the effectiveness of adaptive attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple threat scenarios demonstrate that MirrorCheck consistently outperforms baseline methods, and maintains its utility even under strong adaptive adversarial conditions.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Edit the Bits, Diff the Codes: Bitwise Residual Editing for Visual Autoregressive Models

Text-guided image editing with visual autoregressive (VAR) generators requires controlling both what the model samples and where the sampled change is written back into the image code. Existing VAR editors mainly operate on token streams, features, or flat next-token logits, leaving two native structures of bitwise-residual VAR models underused: the per-bit Bernoulli prediction head and the additive multi-scale residual code field from which the image is assembled. We propose BitResEdit, a training-free editor for bitwise-residual VAR generators such as Infinity. BitEdit performs source-negative guidance by tilting the post-CFG per-bit log-odds along a source–target contrast computed on a shared edited prefix, then projects each update into a closed-form Bernoulli-KL trust region around the clean CFG sampler. ResEdit converts the sampled bits into per-scale continuous-code residuals, gates them with a localization mask, and re-injects them through the generator's native sum-of-scales. Together they couple decision-time bit guidance with combination-time code composition, so masked-out latent features are preserved exactly by code arithmetic while localized, scale-aware edits are applied inside the target region. On PIE-Bench with Infinity-2B, BitResEdit attains the strongest text alignment among same-backbone VAR editors, improving CLIP on the edited region by +1.07 over the strongest prior editor while keeping background preservation competitive with it. Ablations show BitEdit and ResEdit play complementary roles in target alignment and background preservation.

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

ShipNet: A Geometric Deep Learning Surrogate for Real-Time Ship Hydrodynamics

arXiv:2606.15356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate prediction of hydrodynamic performance is central to ship design, yet high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics remains prohibitively expensive for large-scale parametric exploration. This motivates the development of data-driven surrogate models that provide rapid approximations to hydrodynamic predictions at substantially reduced cost. We present ShipNet, a geometric deep-learning surrogate that predicts both hull-surface pressure distributions and far-field free-surface wave patterns directly from hull geometry and speed. The network employs a regularized dynamic graph convolutional backbone on hull point clouds, with a multi-head decoder for simultaneous near-body pressure and free-surface elevation outputs. Training data consist of 420 inviscid free-surface simulations generated using a potential-flow panel method for two parent yacht hulls, each parameterized into 70 variants and evaluated at three speeds. ShipNet predicts per-point pressure coefficient and two-dimensional wave elevation map using a composite loss that combines point-wise regression and image-structure terms. On a geometry-held-out test set, ShipNet achieves R^2=0.98 for hull pressure and R^2=0.91 for wave fields. Inference requires approximately 0.15s per case, yielding over a 550x speedup relative to the potential-flow solver on conventional hardware. Limitations include the restricted geometry and speed ranges and the inviscid training data, while future work will extend the model to high-fidelity viscous simulations with physics-informed regularization.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Security and Privacy Prompts in the Wild: What Users Ask LLMs and How LLMs Respond

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to fulfill users' information needs; users ask LLMs about the weather, pose educational questions, and consult them for legal assistance. One particularly understudied area is digital security and privacy (S&P), where users may seek LLMs' help on how to secure their online accounts or protect their computers from cyber attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has collected or analyzed the S&P questions users ask LLMs; prior research on LLM response quality relied on expert-authored S&P misconceptions or FAQs rather than user queries. Drawing from WildChat, a dataset of 3.2M user-LLM conversations collected in the wild, our study identifies 14,727 S&P prompts and categorizes them into nine categories covering a wide range of S&P topics. From the S&P prompts, we sampled 450 and performed a thematic analysis to characterize the S&P questions users ask LLMs. Separate from the thematic analysis, we curated 270 advice-seeking S&P prompts, where users ask for recommendations, guidance, or specific S&P information. We measured LLM response quality and consistency when posing the prompt to LLMs 10 times. We found that commercial LLMs outperform open-weight models (GPT 5.5 provided "good enough" responses on 98% of prompts; Llama 4 on 47%). However, among prompts that received high-quality responses on average, commercial models sometimes produce contradictory responses across runs, risking confusing or misleading users.

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

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.