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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Multi-Agent Transactive Memory

The decentralized deployment of LLM agents with diverse capabilities across diverse tasks motivates infrastructure for knowledge sharing across heterogeneous agent populations. Just as search engines index human-generated artifacts to support human problem solving, retrieval systems can organize agent-generated artifacts for reuse across agent populations. We extend retrieval-augmented generation - which demonstrates the value of human-authored artifacts to individual agents - to retrieval of agent-generated artifacts supporting a population of agents. In particular, agent trajectories encode reusable procedural knowledge, yet these artifacts are typically discarded after a single use or retained only by the producing agent, forcing newly instantiated agents to repeatedly rediscover existing solutions. We propose Multi-Agent Transactive Memory (MATM), a framework for population-level storage and retrieval of agent-generated trajectories, where producer agents contribute trajectories to a shared repository and consumer agents retrieve them to improve task execution. We focus on interactive environments (ALFWorld and WebArena), where trajectories are long and encode especially rich procedural structure. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieving trajectories from MATM improves downstream task performance and reduces interaction steps without coordination or joint training. These results position MATM as a design pattern for population-level experience sharing in open agent ecosystems.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stability of Synthetic Ricci Curvature Lower Bounds for Inverse Limit Extended Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.14322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that every Polish extended metric measure space arises as an inverse limit of metric measure spaces up to isomorphism. We then prove that synthetic Ricci curvature lower bounds and several functional inequalities, including the log-Sobolev, Talagrand, Poincaré, and dimension-free Harnack inequalities are stable under inverse limit. We discuss applications to infinite-dimensional spaces, including abstract Wiener spaces and their quotient spaces.

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

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

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

Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling

arXiv:2606.15623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a question prioritizer to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS) framework achieves this through three integrated components: (1) a bottom-up MergeSort scheduler that structures comparisons and exploits transitivity, (2) a composite Surprise Scorer – combining position-bias-cancelled VLM confidence, Elo gap, and vote entropy – to quantify comparison ambiguity, and (3) an adaptive budget allocator that routes high-surprise pairs to humans while automating low-surprise pairs via transitivity inference. Validation was conducted on six diverse benchmarks spanning text similarity (STS-B, BIOSSES, SICKR-STS) and image quality assessment (KonIQ-10k, TID2013, LIVE Challenge). SGS effectively identified and skipped up to 535 non-informative comparisons per session. Consequently, it achieved Kendall's $\tau{\times}100$ improvements of $+6$ to $+12$ over Active Elo under the same total budget. These results demonstrate that combining VLM-guided surprise metrics with algorithmic sorting provides a generally consistent accuracy-efficiency trade-off across diverse domains.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Point-group symmetry analysis of many-electron wavefunctions on a quantum computer

arXiv:2605.24824v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A point group is a set of spatial symmetry operations in molecular systems and is an indispensable tool for analyzing molecular orbitals and spectroscopy experiments in chemistry. Several quantum algorithms to exploit this symmetry have been proposed, but practical implementations of point-group symmetry operations and the detailed symmetry analysis of realistic many-electron wavefunctions are still missing. In this work, we propose an ancilla-free hybrid method to analyze point-group symmetries of many-electron states, which works for both abelian and non-abelian groups. For a given wavefunction, our method calculates the projection weights of point-group irreducible representations by applying orbital rotations derived from the eigenvectors of the representation matrices, making it applicable to arbitrary basis functions. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations of benzene and ferrocene molecules. Furthermore, we perform a hardware demonstration of the weight calculation of the ground state and the first excited state of benzene in $D_{2h}$ symmetry, using up to 32 qubits of IBM's ibm_kawasaki device. By combining a tensor-network based encoding scheme and error mitigation techniques, we find the weights of irreducible representations for both states are faithfully reproduced within a few percent error. Our results suggest that the proposed method serves as a practical tool for analyzing symmetry properties of many-electron wavefunctions in realistic material simulations on near-term and early fault-tolerant quantum computers.

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

Invoice Haystack: Benchmarking Document Retrieval and Visual Question Answering Under Strong Visual Homogeneity

Vision Language Models have achieved near-human performance on single-document Visual Question Answering, yet their effectiveness degrades significantly when retrieving information from large collections of visually homogeneous documents. Existing multi-document benchmarks aggregate diverse document types, creating artificial separation in embedding space that does not reflect enterprise document repositories where thousands of records share identical visual templates. We identify this as embedding collapse and introduce Invoice Haystack, a benchmark with 1,500 anonymized invoice images paired with 200 discriminative question-answer pairs, specifically designed to stress-test retrieval under strong visual homogeneity. Invoice Haystack exhibits a mean pairwise cosine similarity of 0.73, compared to 0.38 (DocHaystack) and 0.31 (InfoHaystack) in existing benchmarks, posing a fundamentally more challenging retrieval problem. Addressing the identified challenge, we propose VL-RAG, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation framework that jointly leverages text and visual embeddings to harness the complementary strengths of both modalities, followed by a VLM-based verification filter for precise document identification. VL-RAG achieves 60.0\% Recall@1 on Invoice Haystack-500, outperforming existing state-of-the-art method by up to an absolute 13.5 percentage points. It further improves retrieval considerably on DocHaystack-1000 (77.1\% vs.\ 75.2\%) and InfoHaystack-1000 (84.5\% vs.\ 80.0\%), establishing the proposed dual-stream fusion as a consistently superior retrieval strategy across both homogeneous and heterogeneous document collections.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Quantifying Subliminal Behavioral Transfer Ratios in Language Model Distillation

Distillation of a language model intended to transfer benign behavior to a student model may also transfer undesirable characteristics, if they are present in the teacher model, a phenomenon known as subliminal learning. While qualitative evidence supports the existence of this effect, its magnitude has not been systematically characterized. This study quantifies subliminal behavioral transfer ratios by steering two teacher models (Llama-2-7B-Chat and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct) at varying steering strengths and distilling student models using only benign data. Evaluation on 100 JailbreakBench prompts with GPT-4.1, serving as the evaluator, indicates that transfer is robust but exhibits distinct scaling behaviors. Llama-2 demonstrates a sharp threshold ($\tau = {0.25,0.32} \ beyond \ \alpha = -0.15$), whereas Qwen2.5 displays continuous and higher levels of transfer ($\tau$ up to $0.61$).

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FinAcumen: Financial Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Evolving Experience Memory Harness

arXiv:2606.17642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial multimodal reasoning requires agents to coordinate numerical computation, retrieval, visual interpretation, and temporal grounding across heterogeneous evidence sources. Existing tool-augmented agents improve execution fidelity, yet remain largely stateless across episodes, repeatedly rediscovering reasoning strategies and failure patterns. In high-stakes financial settings, this leads to unreliable tool routing, noisy retrieval, and hallucination-prone reasoning. We present FinAcumen, a financial reasoning agent framework centered on selective experience memory for tool-augmented multimodal reasoning. FinAcumen accumulates financially grounded reasoning experience from prior trajectories, distilling successful strategies and failure-derived cautionary rules into a persistent memory bank. During inference, retrieved experiences condition reasoning only when semantic relevance exceeds a calibrated threshold, while irrelevant memory is explicitly suppressed through a fallback mechanism. A deterministic financial tool environment further grounds numerical computation, retrieval, visual decoding, and answer verification.Across four financial multimodal reasoning benchmarks, FinAcumen consistently improves a frozen 8B vision-language model over finance-specialized models and approaches leading proprietary general-purpose models. Further analysis shows that selective experience activation improves reasoning reliability under retrieval uncertainty. Our code is anonymously available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FinAcumen

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

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

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.

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

Dimensionality Reduction of QAOA Parameter Space with Kernel PCA for Max-Cut

arXiv:2606.23718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading variational algorithm for combinatorial optimization on near term quantum devices. As circuit depth increases, the number of optimization parameters grows, making the search landscape increasingly nonlinear and difficult to optimize. Previous studies have shown that optimal QAOA parameters often lie on a low dimensional manifold that can be approximated using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at shallow circuit depths. However, the effectiveness of PCA decreases at higher depths because the underlying parameter manifold becomes increasingly nonlinear. In this work, we investigate Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) with a radial basis function kernel as a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for QAOA parameter optimization. The model is trained using 200 graphs from each of 3 graph families, namely Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz, with graph sizes ranging from 7 to 10 nodes. Performance is evaluated on 30 test graphs containing 12 nodes at circuit depths 1, 2, 4, and 8. Experimental results demonstrate that KPCA consistently outperforms PCA at deeper circuit depths across all graph families. At depth 8, KPCA achieves approximation ratios above 0.86, while PCA declines to approximately 0.81 to 0.83. Both methods reduce the number of quantum circuit evaluations by more than 93 percent relative to unrestricted QAOA optimization. These findings suggest that nonlinear kernel methods more effectively capture the structure of the QAOA parameter manifold and provide a practical approach for scaling variational quantum optimization to deeper circuits.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Variational Test-time Optimization for Diffusion Synchronization

Collaborative generation, which coordinates multiple diffusion trajectories to extend the capabilities of pretrained priors, has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extending the applicability of diffusion models. Among existing approaches, diffusion synchronization provides a scenario-agnostic solution by introducing general guidance mechanisms. However, current synchronization approaches rely heavily on heuristics and still require task-specific tailoring, which limits their generalizability and performance. In this work, we mathematically derive a synchronization framework based on optimal control, providing a principled explanation of diffusion synchronization. During sampling, we optimize control variables to guide multiple trajectories toward coherent solutions while remaining close to the underlying diffusion prior. Our method operates entirely at test-time without additional training, thereby enabling broad applicability across diverse generation scenarios when combined with strong pretrained priors. We demonstrate consistent improvements over baselines on three representative collaborative generation tasks, covering a wide range of modalities and applications. Beyond performance gains, our work establishes a novel foundation for collaborative generation, opening a principled path toward extending pretrained generative models to new collaborative generation settings.

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

Learning Variable-Length Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2605.17779v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates recommendation as next-token prediction over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). A fundamental yet unexplored design choice is that existing methods employ fixed-length tokenization for all items, implicitly assuming uniform encoding capacity regardless of item characteristics. Through systematic experiments across four datasets, we discover the Popularity-Length Paradox: popular items achieve optimal performance with short IDs, while tail items require substantially longer codes to capture discriminative semantics. This reveals a critical mismatch where popular items benefit from abundant collaborative signals and require minimal semantic detail, whereas tail items must rely on fine-grained content features due to sparse interaction data. To address this, we propose VarLenRec, a framework for learning variable-length tokenization. We develop Popularity-Weighted Information Budget Allocation (PIBA), an information-theoretic framework proving that optimal ID length should scale as a negative power of popularity. Directly implementing variable-length allocation faces two technical challenges: standard Euclidean residual quantization lacks geometric capacity to support diverse code lengths without distortion, and discrete length decisions are non-differentiable. We address these through Hyperbolic Residual Quantization, which leverages the exponential volume growth of the Poincaré ball to naturally stratify encoding capacity, and a Soft Length Controller, which enables differentiable length prediction via continuous layer retention probabilities regularized by PIBA-derived priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VarLenRec achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy and training/inference efficiency, revealing the importance of adaptive encoding capacity in generative recommendation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

作者:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Entropy-Based Observability for AI Agent Behavior

AI agents are typically instrumented through outcome-oriented indicators such as task success, reward, latency, and cost.Although these indicators are operationally important, they provide limited visibility into the internal structure of agent behavior such as the degree of exploration, the rigidity or diversity of action selection, the concentration of tool use, the reduction of uncertainty across a run, and the stability of behavior across repeated executions.This paper proposes Entropy-Based Observability for AI Agents (EOA), a lightweight framework for deriving behavioral telemetry from agent traces.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Disentangling Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Physics-Informed Neural Networks. Application to Insulation Material Degradation Prognostics

arXiv:2601.03673v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a framework for integrating physical laws with data. However, their application to Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) remains constrained by the limited uncertainty quantification (UQ) capabilities. Most existing PINN-based prognostics approaches are deterministic or account only for epistemic uncertainty, limiting their suitability for risk-aware decision-making. This work introduces a heteroscedastic Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Network (B-PINN) framework that jointly models epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, yielding full predictive posteriors for spatiotemporal insulation material ageing estimation. The approach integrates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) with physics-based residual enforcement and prior distributions, enabling probabilistic inference within a physics-informed learning architecture. The framework is evaluated on transformer insulation ageing application, validated with a finite-element thermal model and field measurements from a solar power plant, and benchmarked against deterministic PINNs, dropout-based PINNs (d-PINNs), and alternative B-PINN variants. Results show that the proposed B-PINN provides improved predictive accuracy and better-calibrated uncertainty estimates than competing approaches. A systematic sensitivity study further analyzes the impact of boundary-condition, initial-condition, and residual sampling strategies on accuracy, calibration, and generalization, and the influence of measurement noise on aleatoric uncertainty. Overall, the findings highlight the capability of Bayesian physics-informed learning to support uncertainty-aware prognostics and informed decision-making in transformer asset management by tracking aleatoric and epistemic sources of uncertainty.

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

Federated Foundation Language Model Post-Training Should Focus on Open-Source Models

arXiv:2505.23593v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training of foundation language models has emerged as a promising research domain in federated learning (FL) with the goal to enable privacy-preserving model improvements and adaptations to user's downstream tasks. Recent advances in this area adopt centralized post-training approaches that build upon black-box foundation language models where there is no access to model weights and architecture details. Although the use of black-box models has been successful in centralized post-training, their blind replication in FL raises several concerns. Our opinion is that using black-box models in FL contradicts the core principles of federation such as data privacy and autonomy. In this paper, we critically analyze the usage of black-box models in federated post-training, and provide a detailed account of various aspects of openness and their implications for FL.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

SPICE-Q and Large-Scale Quantum Chip Production

arXiv:2606.17907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose SPICE-Q, a SPICE-inspired design-technology co-optimization framework for superconducting quantum processors. Rather than replacing tools such as HFSS, Qiskit Metal, pyEPR, SQcircuit, SQuADDS, scqubits, or QuTiP, SPICE-Q aims to connect them through a unified, traceable data chain spanning process rules, layout, electromagnetic simulation, energy-participation-ratio and circuit quantization, Hamiltonian extraction, noise analysis, cryogenic test, and manufacturing feedback. The central mapping is from process and PDK constraints to layout geometry, electromagnetic modes, equivalent circuit parameters, effective Hamiltonians, and finally metrics such as frequency, coupling, anharmonicity, decoherence, readout performance, and yield. This flow must capture Josephson-junction variability, transmon frequency allocation, resonator and Purcell constraints, coupler crosstalk, microwave routing, 3D interconnects, material/interface loss, package modes, and wafer-scale process statistics. By introducing standardized model interfaces, statistical parameter models, model cards, version governance, and closed-loop calibration from cryogenic and fabrication data, SPICE-Q frames superconducting quantum-chip design as an engineering workflow rather than a collection of isolated simulations. We argue that scalable and fault-tolerant quantum processors will require such a continuous model chain from device physics and electromagnetic fields to quantum dynamics, noise, manufacturability, and system-level yield.

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

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fourier analysis of quantum neural network with non-linear data embedding

arXiv:2606.14206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fourier analysis has become a crucial tool for understanding the expressivity of Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC) models, as well as an important indicator of barren plateaus (BP). While existing literature has only studied angle-embedded VQCs in a noiseless environment, here we develop the Fourier analysis of VQCs with non-linear data embedding, with particular focus on amplitude embedding, which provides a naturally compact encoding scheme. We first investigate a subtle difference in the domain of input features within amplitude embedding that leads to a distinct expressivity of the zero-frequency Fourier coefficient. By assuming that the ensemble of unitaries generated from the parameter space forms at least a 2-design with respect to the unitary group, we derive, via Weingarten calculus, that the mean of the Fourier coefficients is concentrated at zero, and the variance scales at an exponentially decaying order with respect to the multi-dimensional frequency magnitude. When a noise channel with unitary Kraus operators and probabilities $\{p_k\}$ is taken into account, the variance is further suppressed by a factor $\left(\sum_k p_k^2\right)^{Q}

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Predicting optimal growth temperatures of bacteria using learned structural information from a single protein

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species are most likely to thrive. Although the OGTs for most bacteria remain unknown, the increasing availability of genomes from uncultivated and cultivated taxa has made it advantageous to build genomic, cultivation-independent models to infer OGT. However, pre-existing genomic models often lack the generalizability and mechanistic grounding required for robust inferences of OGT. We propose a novel framework for predicting bacterial OGT which uses learned protein structural signatures of thermal adaptation. We hypothesize that biophysical tradeoffs which dictate enzymatic functions across variable temperatures provide a more robust empirical basis for OGT prediction than broad genomic features. Our OGT-predicting model, ROSEATE, is based on a single gene, adenylate kinase (ADK), that encodes for a ubiquitous enzyme essential for energy homeostasis. ROSEATE uses high-dimensional latent space encoding via MSA Transformer, a protein language model which embeds ADKs in a manner which preserves biophysical information about embedded proteins. We show that the accuracy of the ROSEATE model is on par with other genome-based models, has a high degree of phylogenetic generalizability, and the ESM embeddings effectively capture key temperature-adaptive enzyme characteristics derived from AlphaFold structures. Because ROSEATE is based on analyses of a single ubiquitous protein, it can be used with metagenomic data to infer the community-level variation in bacterial OGTs. We demonstrate this feature of ROSEATE by reconstructing ADK sequences from over 500 environmental and host-associated metagenomes, successfully distinguishing community-wide thermal preferences across diverse habitats, from polar oceans to mammalian guts. By transitioning from genomic proxies to informationally dense protein structural features, this work provides an efficient, interpretable tool for predicting bacterial OGTs across taxa and whole communities.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DP-Hype: Federated Differentially Private Hyperparameter Search

arXiv:2510.04902v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tuning hyperparameters in federated machine learning can substantially impact model performance. When hyperparameters are tuned on sensitive data, privacy becomes an important challenge and to this end, differential privacy has emerged as the de facto standard for provable privacy. A standard setting in federated learning is that clients agree on a shared setup, i.e., find a compromise from a set of hyperparameters, like a model's learning rate. Yet, prior work on privacy-preserving hyperparameter tuning is tailored to specific learning tasks, does not account for the privacy leakage of aggregated results, or offers a sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-off. In this work, we present our algorithm DP-Hype, which performs a federated and privacy-preserving hyperparameter search by conducting a federated voting based on local hyperparameter evaluations of clients. In this way, DP-Hype selects hyperparameters that lead to a compromise supported by a majority of clients, while maintaining scalability and independence from specific learning tasks. We prove that DP-Hype preserves the strong notion of differential privacy called client-level differential privacy and, importantly, show that its privacy guarantees do not depend on the number of hyperparameters. We also provide bounds on its utility guarantees, that is, the probability of finding good hyperparameters, and implement DP-Hype as a submodule in the popular Flower framework for federated machine learning. In addition, we evaluate performance on multiple benchmark data sets in iid as well as multiple non-iid settings and demonstrate high utility of DP-Hype even under small privacy budgets.