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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sub-Poisson distributions: Concentration inequalities, optimal variance proxies, and closure properties

arXiv:2508.12103v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a nonasymptotic framework for sub-Poisson distributions with moment generating function dominated by that of a Poisson distribution. At its core is a new notion of optimal sub-Poisson variance proxy, analogous to the variance parameter in the sub-Gaussian setting. This framework allows us to derive a Bennett-type concentration inequality without boundedness assumptions and to show that the sub-Poisson property is closed under key operations including independent sums and convex combinations, but not under all linear operations such as scalar multiplication. We derive bounds relating the sub-Poisson variance proxy to sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential Orlicz norms. Taken together, these results unify the treatment of Bernoulli and Poisson random variables and their signed versions in their natural tail regime.

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

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-25

How long-term dietary cholesterol can slow down its own clearance by liver cells

作者: 未知作者

Cholesterol carried by low-density lipoprotein (LDL) drives heart disease and is cleared by liver cells expressing the receptor LDLR. A cell-signalling mechanism has been discovered through which high cholesterol promotes the enzyme-mediated degradation of LDLR. Blocking this enzyme restores LDLR levels in liver cells, suggesting a new strategy for treating high cholesterol. Chronic exposure to cholesterol can move the receptor protein LDLR into cells for degradation.

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

An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics

arXiv:2606.12936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette releases over 43 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets, together with an extensible asset-building pipeline. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, replaying human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce an 11-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 65.5% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 44.1% to 74.7% and {\pi}0 from 40.4% to 46.5%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks.

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

Multi-Task Optimization over Networks of Tasks

arXiv:2604.21991v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-task optimization is a powerful approach for solving a large number of tasks in parallel. However, existing algorithms face distinct limitations: Population-based methods scale poorly and remain underexplored for large task sets. Approaches that do scale beyond a thousand tasks are mostly MAP-Elites variants and rely on a fixed, discretized archive that disregards the topology of the task space. We introduce MONET (Multi-Task Optimization over Networks of Tasks), a multi-task optimization algorithm that models the task space as a graph: tasks are nodes, and edges connect tasks in the task parameter space. This representation enables knowledge transfer between tasks and remains tractable for high-dimensional problems while exploiting the topology of the task space. MONET combines social learning, which generates candidates from neighboring nodes via crossover, with individual learning, which refines a node's own solution independently via mutation. We evaluate MONET on four domains (archery, arm, and cartpole with 5,000 tasks each; hexapod with 2,000 tasks) and show that it matches or exceeds the performance of existing MAP-Elites-based baselines across all four domains.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When the Tool Decides: LLM Agents Defer Blindly to Graph Neural Network Tools, and Stronger Backbones Defer More

arXiv:2606.14476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A growing line of work equips large language model (LLM) agents with graph neural networks (GNNs) as callable tools, assuming the agent exercises judgment over when and how much to rely on such a tool. We test this directly. We expose a frozen GNN to a ReAct-style LLM agent as an explicit tool and measure, on node classification over a text-attributed graph (ogbn-arxiv, replicated on WikiCS), whether the agent uses the tool or merely obeys it. We find the agent does not exercise judgment: its predictions agree with the raw GNN's 97.6-99.2% of the time (5 seeds), collapsing into a GNN parrot that adopts the tool's output wholesale and bypasses its own reasoning. Sweeping backbone capability (Qwen2.5 0.5B-7B), the deference is not a weak-model artifact: among models able to invoke the tool, agreement rises with capability (0.60 to 0.98 from 1.5B to 7B). Crucially, the cost of deference does not shrink as capability grows and grows where alternatives emerge: a per-node oracle over the available actions beats the parrot by 0.09-0.18 at 3B and 0.12-0.22 at 7B, roughly doubling at high homophily, because the parrot is pinned to the frozen GNN while the agent's alternatives improve; at 7B a simple neighbour-label tool overtakes the GNN at high homophily (0.81 vs 0.71) yet the agent still defers. A simple selective-invocation gate recovers about half of that high-homophily gap (0.71 to 0.83) but yields no net global gain, and held-out estimates bound the best achievable gate over standard test-time features to at most a third of the oracle headroom: reliable selective invocation looks limited by available information, not merely router design. Our results are a cautionary measurement: evaluations of agent+tool systems cannot assume the agent adds judgment on top of the tool, and selective invocation must be designed in rather than expected to emerge from scale.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MedPCFM: Improving Medical Point Cloud Completion by Integrating Point Transformers and Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.24433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical point cloud completion is important for anatomical reconstruction and downstream clinical workflows, yet generative modeling in this setting remains insufficiently studied. We investigate completion through continuous-time generative modeling and introduce PCFM, a PTv3-backed flow matching approach for medical point cloud completion. We evaluate on SkullFix and SkullBreak, and additionally on the more recent Mandibular Defect dataset. We build strong baselines by adapting PTv3 to a deterministic encoder-decoder completion model and by instantiating diffusion completion (PCDiff) with both PVCNN and PTv3 denoisers. PCFM with PTv3 is competitive with the deterministic PTv3 baseline and achieves state-of-the-art generative performance across datasets, while requiring substantially fewer sampling steps than diffusion. At the best operating points, PTv3 also yields clear throughput gains, providing up to a 7$\times$ speed-up for PCFM compared to a PVCNN backbone. Finally, we study empirical scaling trends by varying model size and point cardinality, showing consistent gains with higher point resolution and informative trade-offs across model scales.

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

Information Gap and Feasibility-Aware Inference in Binomial Logistic Mixtures

arXiv:2606.15665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper studies the information gap between mixture detection and label recovery in binomial logistic mixtures. Standard likelihood-based criteria such as the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) can detect the presence of two components, but this does not guarantee that the corresponding labels are recoverable. We show that this gap is intrinsic to binomial logistic mixtures with a fixed number of trials: observed-data evidence for mixture structure and per-observation information for label recovery have different local orders in the component separation, and only the former accumulates with the sample size. As a result, there exists a detectable-but-unrecoverable regime in which BIC selects two components while the posterior labels remain essentially uninformative. To address this issue, we propose two feasibility-aware inference procedures: a recoverability-aware BIC with a posterior-entropy penalty and an entropy-regularized estimator that mitigates the tendency of the maximum likelihood estimator to produce overly separated components and overly concentrated posterior responsibilities. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted gap and demonstrate that the proposed methods avoid misleading component selections and improve the calibration of posterior label probabilities.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TS-Fault: Benchmarking Time Series Forecasters Against Structural Faults

arXiv:2606.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting (TSF) underpins consequential decisions in energy, transportation, finance, and healthcare, yet TSF models are almost universally ranked by a single number (e.g., average error) on clean held-out data, under the implicit assumption that it predicts deployed reliability. However, real faults are not i.i.d noise but structured events with temporal shape, broken cross-variable dependencies, regime change coupled with missingness, and causal propagation across a sensing pipeline. Treating TSF robustness as a data-quality problem, we present TS-Fault, a benchmark that evaluates forecasting models under explicit, parameterized fault scenarios with controllable semantic difficulty. TS-Fault organizes recurring failures into four modes along two orthogonal axes (observation- vs mechanism-level; univariate vs multivariate) and injects each fault into the most prediction-critical window via a unified importance score. This design enables robustness to be tested against the structures models actually rely on, rather than reduced to generic noise sensitivity. We evaluate 21 models across 6 datasets, 4 modes, and 5 difficulty levels under a paired clean/corrupt protocol. The results reveal three findings that contradict common leaderboard intuition: (i) clean-data accuracy anti-correlates with robustness; (ii) clean rankings are preserved under observation-level faults but reshuffled under mechanism-level faults; and (iii) all catastrophic failures occur under mechanism-level faults, with foundation models achieving the highest clean-data accuracy yet exhibiting the greatest fragility. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Ray-zyy/TS-Fault.

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

Teach-and-Repeat: Accurately Extracting Operational Knowledge from Mobile Screen Demonstrations to Empower GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.12817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.

13.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-11

Connected or chained by social media? Child and adolescent mental health in a digital era

作者:

by Silja Kosola Social media has evolved from connection to compulsion, disproportionately harming children and adolescents. Addictive designs together with developmental vulnerability fuel mental health risks and highlight the urgent need for stricter age limits and stronger protections. In this Perspective, Silja Kosola outlines how social media disproportionately harms child and adolescent mental health, and argues that while recent policy changes aimed at protecting youth from social media are welcome, stricter age limits and greater accountability of social media companies are needed.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

The Critical Role of Model Selection in Causal Inference: A Comparative Analysis of Classification Models within the InferBERT Framework for Pharmacovigilance

Distinguishing causal adverse drug events (ADEs) from spurious correlations remains a central challenge in pharmacovigilance. The InferBERT framework integrates transformer models with Do-calculus, but its success hinges on the underlying classification model. This study evaluates the impact of model choice in InferBERT, assessing whether simpler models suffice, if domain-specific pre-training helps, whether scaling to LLMs improves causal detection, and the effect of post-hoc calibration. We performed a comparative study on two benchmarks: Analgesics-induced Acute Liver Failure (AILF) and Tramadol-related Mortalities (TRAM). Four models were evaluated-XGBoost (baseline), ALBERT (original InferBERT), BioBERT (biomedical transformer), and Med-LLaMA (medical LLM)-using 5-fold cross-validation repeated over 20 runs. We measured accuracy, Expected Calibration Error (ECE) pre- and post-isotonic regression, and Jaccard concordance of causal terms with PRR, ROR, and EBGM; significance was tested with paired t-tests. BioBERT achieved the highest accuracy on both datasets, while Med-LLaMA underperformed despite its size and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Domain-specific pre-training was decisive. Calibration improved ECE but had mixed effects on accuracy and causal discovery. BioBERT's superiority also yielded the strongest concordance with traditional pharmacovigilance signals. These results show that domain-specific pre-training provides a clear advantage over simpler baselines and larger LLMs. Investing in manageable, domain-aware models is more effective for computational pharmacovigilance than simply scaling model size.

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

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Metadata-Aware Multi-Prompt Reasoning for Zero-Shot Accident Understanding

In this paper, we address the problem of zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos by identifying when an impact event occurs, what type of impact it is, and where in the frame it occurs using natural language. We propose a three-stage pipeline that decomposes the accident understanding into when, what, and where. The first stage extracts a short temporal window around the impact using vision-language similarity. In the second stage, we perform metadata-driven multi-prompt reasoning with five complementary views (baseline, motion, geometry, contrast, and tiebreaker) and resolve disagreement via an entropy-gated pairwise adjudicator. Finally, we localize the impact of an open-vocabulary detector queried on the predicted accident type and scene layout, and aggregate detections across keyframes using a score-weighted centroid. Our pipeline achieves a substantial improvement in the harmonic-mean score over a centre-of-frame baseline on the zero-shot ACCIDENT @ CVPR benchmark. We show that decomposing zero-shot video understanding into temporal localization, semantic classification, and spatial grounding enable more reliable reasoning with vision-language models than direct prompting alone.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Observable signatures of exceptional points from left-right eigenstate distinction

arXiv:2606.11333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Hermitian quantum systems exhibit qualitatively distinct physical behavior compared to Hermitian systems, a prime example being spectral singularities known as exceptional points. Their relevance in, e.g., quantum sensing, unidirectional transport, and robust lasing makes it important to be able to identify exceptional points through observable features of a many-body system. Here, using as an example a one-dimensional complex XY spin chain realizing both rotation-time RT- and parity-time PT-symmetric regimes, we develop a framework for detecting exceptional points based on the distinction between left and right eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian, which in a non-Hermitian system are no longer the adjoint of each other. We first show that a global measure constructed from the difference between the Hamiltonian and its adjoint locates exceptional points via distinct non-analytic behavior. At the level of observables, differences in local spin correlations evaluated on the right and left eigenstates provide a reliable static detection scheme. In contrast, static bipartite entanglement measures fail to capture this distinction, urging us to study the quantum dynamics of the model. Following a sudden quench, we demonstrate that the time-averaged right-left entanglement entropy difference directly encodes signatures of the exceptional point. In the RT-symmetric regime, it exhibits a pronounced peak at the exceptional point, whereas in the PT-symmetric regime it behaves as an order-parameter-like quantity, remaining finite in one phase and vanishing at the transition. Our results establish a direct link between the structure of non-Hermitian eigenstates and observable signatures of exceptional points, providing a practical route to identify them in existing quantum simulators.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

‘Megacluster’ of genes enables bacteria to make potent antibiotic mixture

Soil bacteria make cocktails of molecules that synergistically inhibit the growth of microbial pathogens — suggesting a strategy for tackling antibiotic-resistant infections. Soil bacteria make cocktails of molecules that synergistically inhibit the growth of microbial pathogens — suggesting a strategy for tackling antibiotic-resistant infections.

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

Is GraphRAG Needed? From Basic RAG to Graph-/Agentic Solutions with Context Optimization

As advanced RAG variants like GraphRAG and Agentic RAG emerge, one leading question is when and how to use them. Here, we introduce a framework for different RAG scenarios evaluation and comparison on semi-structured knowledge bases, including regular RAG, GraphRAG, Modular RAG and Agentic RAG. We provide implementation for 9 standardized RAG scenarios, and conduct experiments for a comprehensive comparison. These scenarios are designed for real use cases regarding data and domain restrictions, spanning from simple document-based retrieval to advanced features such as hybrid text-graph retrieval, integration with computed or pre-defined domain knowledge graphs, agentic multi-step planning, and agent-graph integration. Besides, we present a novel context engineering method for GraphRAG and Agentic RAG, addressing the context/memory overflow issues, efficiently managing text and graph retrievals with new representations and agentic loop design, leading to 19%-53% reduction on token usage. Moreover, further analysis identifies a retrieval-generation gap where expanded retrieval does not proportionally improve generation quality, suggesting retrieval-oriented metrics overstate advanced retrieval benefits. This work provides data-driven insights on when and how to use them for building production-ready intelligent RAG systems.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On estimating Schatten norm and power distances between quantum states

arXiv:2505.00457v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the computational complexity of estimating the quantum Schatten $\alpha$-norm distance $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$, given $poly(n)$-size state-preparation circuits of $n$-qubit quantum states $\rho_0$ and $\rho_1$. This quantity serves as a lower bound on the trace distance and, for $\alpha > 1$, is interchangeable with its powered version $\Lambda_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$. For any constant $\alpha > 1$, we develop an efficient rank-independent quantum estimator for $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ with time complexity $poly(n)$, achieving an exponential speedup over the prior best results of $\exp(n)$ due to Wang, Guan, Liu, Zhang, and Ying (TIT 2024). When $01$, QSD$_{\alpha}$ is $\sf BQP$-complete. 2. For any $1 \leq \alpha(n) \leq 1+negl(n)$, QSD$_\alpha$ is $\sf QSZK$-complete, implying that no efficient quantum estimator for $T_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ exists unless ${\sf BQP}={\sf QSZK}$. This $\sf QSZK$-hardness result also extends to the promise problem defined by $\Lambda_\alpha(\rho_0,\rho_1)$ for constant $0

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Structural Role Injection in Handlebars-Templated LLM Prompts: Triple-Brace Interpolation, Delimiter Family, and the Limits of HTML Auto-Escaping

Large language model applications build prompts from templates, and Handlebars is a widely used templating engine and the default prompt-template format in Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Its double-brace {{x}} expression HTML-escapes the interpolated value and is documented as the safe default; its triple-brace {{{x}}} expression inserts the value raw. We show that this choice silently governs an application's exposure to structural role injection, where attacker-controlled data carries chat role delimiters that forge a higher-privilege turn. A model-free analysis establishes the mechanism: Handlebars escaping rewrites angle brackets but not square brackets, colons, or Markdown hashes, so it neutralises ChatML, Llama-3, and XML role delimiters (survival rate 0.00) while leaving Llama-2 [INST], legacy Human:/Assistant:, and Markdown ### delimiters intact (survival rate 1.00 for the last two). We then run 5760 trials across seven delimiter families, two attack objectives, and four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5) at a combined API cost of 1.63 USD. GPT-3.5 Turbo follows the task-hijack instruction in 97% of raw and 91% of escaped trials, with the escaping protection concentrated in the angle-bracket families and absent for the colon- and Markdown-based families; the harder secret-exfiltration objective, which does not saturate, exposes the same family interaction more cleanly. Claude Haiku 4.5 resists both objectives almost entirely. The escaped default protects only the delimiter schemes whose characters HTML escaping happens to cover, gives no protection for the rest, and cannot substitute for a structural separation of instruction and data.

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

A Spatio-Temporal Expert Prefetching Framework for Efficient MoE-based LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.15453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models (LLMs), such as Qwen and DeepSeek, have recently emerged as an effective approach to improving model capacity without proportionally increasing computational cost. By replacing the conventional feed-forward network in dense LLMs with a set of experts and activating only a subset of them for each input token, MoE models significantly increase the total number of parameters while keeping the per-token computation relatively manageable. However, this dynamic and irregular expert activation pattern also introduces substantial expert loading overhead during inference, since the required experts must be fetched on demand according to token-dependent routing results. As a result, expert loading latency becomes a major source of performance and energy inefficiency. To this end, we first perform a comprehensive analysis of expert selection behavior in various MoE-based LLMs and applications, including language understanding and code generation. Our analysis reveals that, within each application domain, expert requests exhibit strong correlation across both adjacent MoE layers and consecutive decoding tokens, making future expert activations predictable. Based on this insight, we propose ST-MoE, a spatio-temporal expert prefetching framework that proactively stages experts ahead of use to overlap expert loading with ongoing computation. ST-MoE combines a lightweight runtime prediction mechanism that preserves the original routing behavior with a reconfigurable hardware design that efficiently supports dynamic expert prefetching. The combined effect of the prediction mechanism with the supporting hardware significantly improves MoE inference performance and energy efficiency while preserving model inference accuracy.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exceptional Points as Manifestations of Analyticity Breakdown in the 't Hooft Model

作者:

arXiv:2606.10141v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We use the exactly-solvable t Hooft model of 1+1D large-N_c QCD as a rigorous laboratory for the breakdown of analyticity of a causal response function, the meson two-point function. A PT-symmetric deformation i gamma(x-1/2) of the light-cone meson operator, the analogue of an imaginary chemical potential, drives the lowest two mesons to an exceptional point (EP) at gamma_c. Recasting the resolvent as a Jacobi continued fraction yields gamma_c in closed form: 2 pi g^2 N_c at the two-pole level, converging to 7.966 g^2 N_c by depth five – an analytic, not numerical, threshold. The square-root exponent nu=1/2 is fixed by the 2x2 Jordan form and confirmed by finite-size scaling to N=1999. The breakdown has an unambiguous time-domain signature: the propagator norm is bounded for gamma < gamma_c, grows linearly at gamma_c (the Jordan secular law), and exponentially beyond – observable, since the deformed operator is a non-Hermitian Wannier-Stark ladder, in photonic and topolectrical analogues. The threshold is locked to confinement, gamma_c propto g^2 N_c, and recurs as a uniform EP cascade; a second, non-reciprocal deformation yields an exactly-exponential non-Hermitian skin effect. This is the first analytically-controlled instance of exceptional-point analyticity breakdown in a confining gauge theory.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.