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

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

Authors:
Po-Chin Chang↗Nicholas Hogan↗Aske Plaat↗Michiel T. van der Meer↗

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

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

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

Authors:
Mariamma Antony↗Raman Sankaran↗Chiranjib Bhattacharyya↗Uma Satya Ranjan↗

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Judge-Aware Ranking Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models without Ground Truth

Authors:
Mingyuan Xu↗Xinzi Tan↗Jiawei Wu↗Doudou Zhou↗

arXiv:2601.21817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. A critical but under-modeled issue is that judge LLMs differ substantially in reliability; treating all judges equally can yield biased leaderboards and misleading uncertainty estimates. More data can make evaluation more confidently wrong under misspecified aggregation. We propose a judge-aware ranking framework that extends the Bradley-Terry-Luce model by introducing judge-specific discrimination parameters, jointly estimating latent model quality and judge reliability from pairwise comparisons without reference labels. We establish identifiability up to natural normalizations and prove consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator, enabling confidence intervals for score differences and rank comparisons. Across multiple public benchmarks and a newly collected dataset, our method improves agreement with human preferences, achieves higher data efficiency than unweighted baselines, and produces calibrated uncertainty quantification for LLM rankings.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

Authors:
Yitao Jiang↗Luyang Zhao↗Muhao Chen↗Devin Balkcom↗

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Clinical Study Protocol of the 'Biomarkers of Severity of COVID-19 Patients' (BIOMARCOVID) Project

Authors:
Dinh↗T.-A↗Leroy↗Brandolini-Bunlon↗Berthier↗Trocme↗Varoquaux↗Plazy↗Vilotitch↗Terra↗Toussaint↗Bosson↗…

Introduction The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has challenged health care systems worldwide, in certain areas exceeding hospital capacities and human resources. This has underscored the importance of having better tools to predict the outcome of potentially severe respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2. Predicting COVID-19 severity may allow physicians to better manage ICU beds and increase the chances of patient survival through appropriate management. During the toughest months of the pandemic, most physicians tried to identify patients that might develop severe forms based primarily on clinical features on admission (e.g., BMI, age). In this context, significant research has focused on identifying comorbidities, clinical manifestations, and routine blood biomarkers to predict disease severity. However, despite the demonstrated value of untargeted metabolomics in assessing severity, limited data exist on its use for identifying novel metabolite biomarkers that could improve both the sensitivity and specificity of outcome prediction. Our goal is to identify metabolite biomarkers that could enhance the predictive accuracy of standard medical biology data and clinical parameters. Methods and analysis This is a retrospective, observational, monocentric cohort study conducted at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes (CHUGA). The maximum number of eligible patients admitted for PCR-confirmed COVID-19 between March and December 2020 will be included. Severity outcome is defined using the WHO 10-category ordinal scale (mild: categories 4-5; severe: >5). Blood samples were collected within 48 hours of admission and analyzed for 62 routine blood tests and untargeted multiplatform LC-MS/MS metabolomics across four national platforms. Statistical analysis will include logistic regression with variable selection for the primary aim, and multi-block chemometric integration of clinical, biological, and metabolomics data as a secondary aim. Ethics and dissemination A study steering committee has been formed to ensure the accuracy of the collected data by thoroughly reviewing it prior to the data lock. All aspects of the study comply with ethical standards, including approval by the CHUGA institutional review board and adherence to CNIL Reference Methodology MR004 for the protection of participants' rights, privacy, and confidentiality. This study is registered on the French Health Data Hub (number F20210218154851). Results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at national and international scientific and clinical conferences, and reports shared with key healthcare system stakeholders.

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

Detecting Historical Turning Points in Italian Media: A Complex Systems Approach to a Diachronic News Corpus

Authors:
Dario Zarcone↗Salvatore Miccich\`e↗David Sanchez↗

The increasing availability of large-scale textual corpora has opened new possibilities for data-driven, quantitative approaches to historical analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, diachronic corpora with historical relevance from the pre-digital era remain scarce and often incomplete. We present a quantitative approach to historical analysis based on the reconstruction and exploration of a diachronic corpus of around 600,000 articles from the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica", covering all the articles published from the 1st of January 1985 to the 31st of December 2000 - a period of major political, social, and geopolitical change in Italy and globally. Using NLP techniques, we analyze the text at both lexical and semantic levels; we then apply tools from complex systems and statistical physics to trace shifts in media discourse over time. This allows us to detect key transition periods, such as the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic in Italy, or major international conflicts like the Gulf War or the Kosovo War, without relying on prior labeling. The results show how combining computational linguistics with ideas from complex systems can offer new quantitative insight into historical changes, opening up new paths for studying the dynamics of media and society through large-scale textual data.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Performance Analysis and Optimization of 3D Generative Diffusion Models across GPU Architectures

Authors:
Jeeho Ryoo↗Yongchan Jung↗Muhammad Ali Khaliq↗Weidong Zhang↗Jiatong Han↗Byeong Kil Lee↗

arXiv:2606.19365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have become essential for high-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial GPU resource demands arising from hundreds of U-Net evaluations per sample and a highly heterogeneous kernel behavior. This paper performs a comprehensive performance analysis of the state-of-the-art medical diffusion model, Med-DDPM, across three generations of NVIDIA architectures to study kernel-level runtime breakdowns, instruction-mix characteristics, memory system utilization, warp-level activities, and profiler priority-score estimates. We show that training is overwhelmingly dominated by cuDNN convolution and implicit-GEMM kernels, with inefficiencies arising from memory-access patterns, tensor-layout conversions, and limited Tensor Core utilization. Guided by these insights, we evaluate two architecture-aware optimizations TF32 Tensor Core activation and a 3D channels-last layout and demonstrate that they reduce SM cycles by up to 100x, cut dynamic instructions by 100x, raise Tensor Core utilization from 1.45 to 9.98x, and increase IPC by 7% on A100, all without degrading synthesis quality.

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

Time-Varying Audio Effect Modeling by End-to-End Adversarial Training

Authors:
Yann Bourdin↗Pierrick Legrand↗Fanny Roche↗

arXiv:2512.15313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has become a standard approach for the modeling of audio effects, yet strictly black-box modeling remains problematic for time-varying systems. Unlike time-invariant effects, training models on devices with internal modulation typically requires the recording or extraction of control signals to ensure the time-alignment required by standard loss functions. This paper introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework to model such effects using only input-output audio recordings, without requiring a modulation signal extraction. We propose a convolutional-recurrent architecture trained via a two-stage strategy: an initial adversarial phase allows the model to learn the distribution of the modulation behavior without strict phase constraints, followed by a supervised fine-tuning phase where a State Prediction Network (SPN) estimates the initial internal states required to synchronize the model with the target. Additionally, a new metric based on chirp-train signals is developed to quantify modulation accuracy. Experiments modeling a vintage hardware phaser demonstrate the method's ability to capture time-varying dynamics in a fully black-box context.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-Guided Semantic Alignment for Feature Fusion Networks

Authors:
Hyungseop Lee↗Jiho Lee↗Woochul Kang↗

Feature fusion networks are fundamental components in modern object detectors, aggregating multi-scale features to detect objects of varying sizes. However, directly fusing features from different pyramid levels often introduces semantic inconsistency due to their heterogeneous representations. In this paper, we propose Feature Interaction NEtwork (FINE), a lightweight semantic alignment module that refines low-level features via high-level contextual guidance using cross-level attention prior to fusion. To bridge the structural gap and ensure computational efficiency, we introduce an Alignment-Aware Token Sampling that aligns corresponding spatial regions across scales, reducing the attention complexity by an order of magnitude. The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is upsampled and applied to the low-level features via residual element-wise modulation. This mechanism ensures that the network selectively enhances semantically relevant pixels while preserving the sub-pixel localization accuracy necessary for dense prediction tasks. FINE is generally applicable to various detectors and consistently improves detection accuracy without compromising efficiency.

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

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

Authors:
Mingjia Li↗Jin Wu↗Hong Qian↗Wenhao Huang↗Yiyang Huang↗Yiwen Zhang↗Chanjin Zheng↗Xiangfeng Wang↗Aimin Zhou↗Jiajun Guo↗

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AIGS-Net: Compact Illumination Field Modeling via 2D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Low-Light Image Enhancement

Authors:
Yuhan Chen↗Kunyang Huang↗Fuchen Li↗Zhuohan Qin↗Guofa Li↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Existing low-light image enhancement methods often face a bottleneck between the representation capacity of illumination-field modeling and computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes an Adaptive Illumination Gaussian Splatting Network (AIGS-Net), an ultra-lightweight architecture for fast low-light enhancement. Unlike conventional static priors, AIGS-Net constructs an input-adaptive 2D Gaussian Splatting illumination field. The opacity of Gaussian basis functions is dynamically modulated by relative luminance statistics of the input image, and spatially varying illumination compensation is rendered through ordered alpha compositing. To guide adaptive illumination compensation efficiently, a zero-parameter nonlinear multiscale contextual encoding module is introduced to extract low-frequency structures and local contrast cues without additional convolutional weights. To suppress noise amplification and sensor-induced color bias, AIGS-Net integrates noise-mask estimation, locked single-channel Gamma mapping, cross-channel consistency regularization, and target color-alignment constraints. Experiments on LOL and LSRW benchmarks show that AIGS-Net improves detail recovery and color fidelity while requiring only approximately 40 learnable parameters, achieving an effective trade-off between enhancement quality and extreme inference efficiency.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity

Authors:
Yifan Mo↗Xiao Fu↗Yue Su↗Qingyu Meng↗Koen Hindriks↗Qingzhi Liu↗Jiahuan Pei↗

arXiv:2606.16003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate mathematical equations from scientific texts. Prior work faces challenges in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and humanaligned evaluation. To this end, we construct a dataset of AI research papers, pairing contextual passages with ground-truth equations and variable descriptions. We develop an explainable equation generation workflow and evaluate it across diverse open- and closed-source LLM backbones. We introduce an evaluation protocol combining automatic metrics, LLM-based rubrics, and human judgments to assess accuracy, explainability, and human-LLM alignment. Results indicate that LLMs perform moderately on lexical- and syntactic-based similarity, while struggling with semantic accuracy. Comparisons between LLM-based evaluations and human judgments reveal limited alignment, highlighting challenges in using LLMs to assess equation quality. These findings offer insights for improving equation generation models and developing more reliable evaluation methods for scientific text. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

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

Learning to Annotate Delayed and False AEB Events: A Practical System for Extreme Class Imbalance and Asymmetric Label Noise

Authors:
Mengxiang Hao↗Xin Jiang↗Xinghao Huang↗Wenliang Su↗Zhiteng Wang↗Junjie Rao↗Xiaotian Yang↗Wei Liao↗Chengyu Han↗Gen Liang↗Yulun Song↗Zhitao Xu↗…

arXiv:2606.19186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) optimization relies on accurately annotated real-world trigger events, particularly rare but critical delayed and false AEB triggers that expose system deficiencies. However, these minority samples comprise less than 5% of thousands of daily triggers, making manual annotation prohibitively expensive at scale. We present the first automated AEB annotation framework to address this problem. During development, we identified two fundamental challenges that severely impair delayed/false trigger annotation accuracy: (1) Extreme class imbalance where delayed/false triggers are overwhelmed by true triggers; (2) Asymmetric label noise where mislabeled majority samples (true triggers) suppress minority samples (delayed/false triggers) learning. To overcome these challenges, we propose two key innovations: (1) Specific data augmentation that synthesizes realistic samples by manipulating focal target attributes, transplanting ego-vehicle dynamics, and masking non-focal agents; (2) noise suppression using stable hardness estimation and probe-guided adaptive threshold to clean mislabeled true trigger samples. Crucially, we deploy our model as a practical annotation system with full-stack architecture, efficiently identifying critical delayed/false triggers from thousands of daily AEB events. Production results demonstrate 80% improvement in recall of delayed/false triggers and 50% reduction in manual workload. Beyond immediate gains, the system enables continuous self-improvement through accumulated high-quality annotations, establishing a necessary data foundation for on-vehicle AEB system optimization

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Programmable Gauge-Field Textures with Ultracold Atoms in Momentum Space

Authors:
Hongru Wang↗Hang Li↗Yichen Pan↗Yuyan Luo↗Bryce Gadway↗Tao Chen↗Bo Yan↗

arXiv:2606.15124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic gauge fields with ultracold atoms offer a route to quantum matter in which electromagnetic environments can be designed rather than merely imposed. While the Harper-Hofstadter model has been realized in several cold-atom systems, existing implementations are largely limited to spatially uniform magnetic fluxes. Here we experimentally realize a highly programmable two-dimensional momentum-state lattice of ultracold atoms with local control over the Peierls phase pattern, enabling direct implementation of Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonians with tunable and spatially structured synthetic gauge fields. We observe a crossover from ballistic to strongly flux-modified bulk dynamics with suppressed transport. By introducing a synthetic electric field through site-dependent energy gradients, we further demonstrate Hall-type transverse drift arising from the interplay between electric and magnetic fields. In addition, we engineer a synthetic flux domain wall separating regions with opposite magnetic fluxes and observe anisotropic propagation guided along the interface. These results move cold-atom gauge-field engineering from uniform magnetic backgrounds toward designer gauge textures, providing an experimental setting for transport across programmable topological interfaces.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The quantum harmonic oscillator and the real Hilbert space

Authors:
Sergio Giardino↗

arXiv:2606.12060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The harmonic oscillator is considered within generalized frameworks using complex and quaternionic numbers. The classical oscillator is considered in terms of a complex position function, and quantum oscillators are examined in terms of complex wave functions, and in terms of quaternionic wave functions as well. Both of the quantum solutions are obtained within the real Hilbert space formalism. The results reveal the complex and quaternionic descriptions as suitable frameworks for non-stationary processes, including damped oscillations, forced oscillations, and additionally self-interacting processes that cannot be appropriately described otherwise.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Authors:
Tiruwa↗K. R↗Ghimire↗

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Authors:
Amirhosein Javadi↗Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti↗Tara Javidi↗

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Token Complexity Theory for AI-Augmented Computing

Authors:
Jie Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-augmented computing delegates natural language queries, code generation requests, and other open-ended tasks to a cluster of AI models that processes queries and generates responses. This paradigm introduces a resource dimension that neither classical time nor space complexity captures: the cost of sending queries to and receiving responses from such a cluster. We introduce token complexity, a formal resource measure defined as the minimum expected token cost to achieve a specified level of output quality on a task, and develop a taxonomy classifying AI systems by the strength of their probabilistic properties. We develop token complexity within the framework of AI-Oracle Turing machines, in which a probabilistic Turing machine interacts with a stochastic oracle via dedicated query and response tapes. We prove basic theorems establishing that token complexity behaves as expected: monotonicity (higher quality costs more tokens), convexity (quality improvements become progressively more expensive), price sensitivity (small price changes produce bounded cost changes), and price-relativity of task ordering (the token complexity ordering of tasks can reverse depending on the query-to-response cost ratio). We prove that the complexity frontier, defined as the set of all feasible resource bounds in tokens, time, and space, is non-empty, upward-closed, and convex.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

Authors:
Mathis Gerdes↗Miranda C. N. Cheng↗

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Authors:
Selen Erkan↗Bastian Boll↗Kristian Kersting↗Bj\"orn Deiseroth↗Letitia Parcalabescu↗

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.

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

Deterministic Policy Gradient for Learning Equilibrium in Time-Inconsistent Control Problems

Authors:
Xin Guo↗Yijie Huang↗Xiang Yu↗

arXiv:2606.11798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we develop a continuous-time model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn deterministic equilibrium policies in general time-inconsistent control problems. Utilizing the extended Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman system, we recast the original time-inconsistent problem into an equivalent two-stage problem. In the first stage, for given auxiliary functions, we employ the deterministic policy gradient approach to learn an optimal policy in an auxiliary time-consistent control problem. In the second stage, given the updated policy, we exploit the inner fixed point iterations and some martingale characterizations to learn the auxiliary functions. As a theoretical contribution, we provide some mild model assumptions and establish the convergence of inner fixed point iterations. By repeating this actor-critic style of iterations across two stages, our algorithm aims to learn the equilibrium under different sources of time-inconsistency in a unified manner. The superior effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are illustrated in two classical financial applications with time-inconsistency: mean-variance portfolio management and optimal tracking portfolio under non-exponential discounting.

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

Improved Cryogenic Photodiode Optical Biasing for Low-Noise and Low-Jitter Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

Authors:
Jia-Hao Hu↗Wei-Jun Zhang↗Wen-Shuo Yu↗Yu-Ze Wang↗Dong-Wei Chu↗Ya-Tao Peng↗Hui-Qin Yu↗Pu-Sheng Yuan↗Ling Wu↗Li-Xing You↗

arXiv:2606.07140v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate an improved optical biasing scheme for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), which employs a cryogenic InGaAs-InP photodiode (PD) as a local bias source. It is found that, under illumination from a stable external light source, this PD generates a stable photocurrent in a cryogenic environment (~2.3 K), with fluctuations in the photocurrent primarily attributed to fluctuations in the incident optical power. Furthermore, by screening and effectively blocking stray photons leaking from the PD, which give rise to background dark counts, we have achieved an SNSPD exhibiting an ultra-low intrinsic dark count rate of 1e-4 cps. Utilizing this improved optical biasing technique, our SNSPD achieved performance comparable to that obtained under conventional electrical biasing: a system detection efficiency of 80.7%, a background dark count rate of 32.6 cps, and a minimum timing jitter of 57.5 ps. These results indicate that cryogenic-PD-based optical biasing serves as a viable, low-noise, and low-jitter alternative to traditional electrical biasing. Moreover, this work offers useful design guidance for the future development of PD-based low-noise bias sources and for the construction of all-photonic SNSPD systems tailored for high-precision quantum photonics applications.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

Authors:
Jiang-Lin Zhou↗Yu-Xuan Zhang↗Choo Hiap Oh↗Jing-Ling Chen↗

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Unifying Learning Dynamics and Generalization in Transformers Scaling Law

Authors:
Chiwun Yang↗

The scaling law, a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) development, predicts improvements in model performance with increasing computational resources. Yet, while empirically validated, its theoretical underpinnings remain poorly understood. This work formalizes the learning dynamics of transformer-based language models as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) system, then approximates this process to kernel behaviors. Departing from prior toy-model analyses, we rigorously analyze stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training for multi-layer transformers on sequence-to-sequence data with arbitrary data distribution, closely mirroring real-world conditions. Our analysis characterizes the convergence of generalization error to the irreducible risk as computational resources scale with data, especially during the optimization process. We establish matching upper and lower bounds on the excess risk, characterized by a distinct phase transition. In the initial optimization phase, the excess risk decays exponentially relative to the computational cost ${\sf C}$. However, once a specific resource allocation threshold is crossed, the system enters a statistical phase, where the generalization error follows a power-law decay of $\Theta(\mathsf{C}^{-1/7})$. These rates are certified by complementary lower bounds – statistical, via an information-theoretic two-point reduction, and optimization-side, via a first-order oracle argument – rendering the two-stage law tight up to constants, logarithmic factors, and a condition-number gap. Beyond this unified framework, our theory derives isolated scaling laws for model size, training time, and dataset size, elucidating how each variable independently governs the bounds of generalization.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

Authors:
Litian Liang↗Jingxi Xu↗Xinda Qi↗Yujun Cai↗Houzhu Ding↗Luqi Wang↗Zhixin Sun↗Jyh-Herng Chow↗Ming Yang↗Mark Cutkosky↗

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

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