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

Neural quantum states for entanglement depth certification from randomized Pauli measurements

arXiv:2512.13121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement depth quantifies how many qubits share genuine multipartite entanglement, but certification typically relies on tailored witnesses or full tomography, both of which scale poorly with system size. We recast entanglement-depth and non-$k$-separability certification as likelihood-based model selection among neural quantum states whose architecture enforces a chosen entanglement constraint. A hierarchy of separable neural quantum states is trained on finite-shot local Pauli outcomes and compared against an unconstrained reference model trained on the same data. When all constrained models are statistically disfavored, the data certify entanglement beyond the imposed limit directly from measurement statistics, without reconstructing the density matrix. We validate the method on simulated six- and ten-qubit datasets targeting GHZ, Dicke, and Bell-pair states, and demonstrate robustness for mixed states under local noise. Finally, we discuss lightweight interpretability diagnostics derived from trained parameters that expose coarse entanglement patterns and qubit groupings directly from bitstring statistics.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.12688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We are entering a new era of composite model architectures that integrate diverse components such as vision encoders, language backbones, diffusion and flow heads, audio codecs, action generators, and world-model predictors. Such architectures underpin a broad class of multimodal models, including unified multimodal models, omni models, speech-language models, vision-language-action policies, and world models. However, existing model serving frameworks were built on narrow assumptions about model structure, making them ill-suited to accommodate this new architectural diversity. Here we present M*, a universal serving system for efficient serving of composite AI models. M* represents models as dataflow graphs, processing requests spanning diverse modalities and tasks as traversals over these graphs. The core insight is a modular abstraction that supports arbitrary composition of model components, flexible placement onto a physical cluster, and model-agnostic optimizations within a distributed runtime. We call this abstraction the Walk Graph and show how it can concisely capture composite models from a broad range of families. We instantiate M* on representative models and find that it achieves, on average, 20% lower end-to-end latency than vLLM-Omni for text-to-image workloads on BAGEL, while delivering up to 2.9x lower real-time factor and 2.7x higher throughput for text-to-speech workloads on Qwen3-Omni. M* also outperforms the V-JEPA 2-AC rollout baseline for robotic planning by up to 12.5x. Thus, our work paves the road towards more efficient serving of complex models with minimal developer effort.

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

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

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

Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation: A Robust Loss that Doubles as an Unsupervised Contamination Classifier

arXiv:2606.16524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineered robust losses such as Huber, Student-$t$, and generalised cross-entropy make supervised models tolerant of contamination but cannot answer which observations are corrupted. We introduce Neural Bayesian Anomaly Mitigation (NBAM), a general-purpose drop-in loss derived from a Bayesian latent-switch mixture model: the marginal likelihood defines a robust supervised loss, and the associated posterior defines an unsupervised contamination classifier. Like Huber or Student-$t$, NBAM can replace the standard training loss in any supervised pipeline; unlike them, it additionally learns a structured contamination model and returns a calibrated per-sample contamination posterior. A learned input-dependent prior $\pi_\phi(x)$ captures the spatial locality of contamination, so that samples near known corruptions are more likely to be flagged, while an Occam penalty emerges automatically and regularises against over-flagging. On CIFAR-10 with asymmetric label contamination, NBAM recovers the structure of the corruption process without supervision: the contamination posterior separates clean from corrupted samples, and the learned anomaly head identifies the direction of every label-flip pair. Alongside these capabilities, NBAM outperforms the four robust-loss baselines considered here at contamination rates 0.2-0.6.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

C2FL: Clustered Continual Federated Learning under Spatial and Temporal Drift

arXiv:2606.18003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) increasingly rely on machine learning to let each node learn from locally sensed data, aligning its behavior with the surrounding environment. Scaling this intelligence, however, raises fundamental challenges: sensed data is often privacy-sensitive, preventing centralized collection; nodes are mobile, traversing regions where nearby nodes perceive similar phenomena while distant ones observe radically different conditions, creating natural spatial clusters; and these distributions evolve over time due to mobility, introducing temporal drift that makes local models progressively stale. These dynamics arise across domains - vehicular sensing, drone-based monitoring, smartphone crowdsensing - yet the interplay of privacy, spatial heterogeneity, and temporal drift severely undermines conventional learning strategies. Therefore, we propose C2FL, a fully distributed Federated Learning (FL) approach where nodes self-organize into learning groups through spatial clustering, reflecting the geographic structure of the environment. To counteract temporal drift, each node combines experience replay with a dwell-time-aware adaptive averaging step, progressively incorporating the regional consensus as it remains longer within the same area, while preserving previously acquired knowledge under evolving distributions. We evaluate our approach on synthetic experiments that systematically reproduce spatial and temporal shifts, showing that standard federated strategies degrade significantly under these conditions and that our method restores robust collective adaptation.

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

SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.

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

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

arXiv:2602.03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Compressed Computation is (probably) not Computation in Superposition

arXiv:2606.14673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether the Compressed Computation (CC) toy model (Braun et al., 2025) is an instance of computation in superposition. The CC model appears to compute 100 ReLU functions with just 50 neurons, achieving a better loss than expected from only representing 50 ReLU functions. We show that the model mixes inputs via its noisy residual stream, corresponding to an unintended mixing matrix in the labels. Splitting the training objective into the ReLU term and the mixing term, we find that performance gains scale with the magnitude of the mixing matrix and vanish when the matrix is removed. The learned neuron directions concentrate in the subspace associated with the top 50 eigenvalues of the mixing matrix, suggesting that the mixing term governs the solution. Finally, a semi-non-negative matrix factorization (SNMF) baseline derived solely from the mixing matrix reproduces the qualitative loss profile and improves on prior baselines, though it does not match the trained model. These results suggest CC is not a suitable toy model of computation in superposition.

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

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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

IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $\sigma$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.

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

Cross-Modal Registration Between 3D and 2D Fingerprints via Pose-Aware Unwrapping and Point-Cloud Fusion

Three-dimensional (3D) fingerprints preserve global finger geometry and local ridge structure while avoiding contact-induced deformation, but they remain difficult to integrate with legacy two-dimensional (2D) fingerprint systems. This paper addresses the intermediate stage between 3D acquisition and cross-modal matching, and presents a unified framework for 3D fingerprint preprocessing and registration across contactless and contact-based 2D modalities. The framework combines four components: 1) a nonparametric visualization and unwrapping method that converts a 3D fingerprint point cloud into a rolled-equivalent 2D representation without relying on a global finger-shape model; 2) a point-cloud fusion pipeline that registers and mosaics multiple partial 3D captures into a more complete fingerprint model; 3) an ellipse-based pose normalization method for canonical finger alignment; and 4) a pose-aware cross-modal registration strategy that improves compatibility between 3D fingerprints and both contactless and contact-based 2D fingerprints. Experiments on a self-collected multimodal fingerprint database containing 150 fingers show that the proposed framework achieves ridge-level 3D registration accuracy, robust pose estimation, and consistent gains in 2D compatibility. In particular, the 3D fusion error is concentrated around 0.09 mm, contactless 2D–3D registration reaches ridge-scale projection accuracy, and pose-aware unwrapping improves genuine matching scores relative to generic 3D unwrapping. These results support the use of 3D fingerprints as an effective geometric bridge across heterogeneous fingerprint modalities. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/3DFpVisual.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A Gauge-Covariant Geometric Framework for Non-Hermitian Quantum Systems

arXiv:2606.15922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a comprehensive, gauge-covariant geometric framework for non-Hermitian quantum systems in the quasi-Hermitian regime, that is, the region of parameter space where the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian admits a real spectrum and a positive-definite metric operator. We build this framework by elevating the Dyson map to a central geometric object. This map is the transformation that converts a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian into an equivalent Hermitian one. From it we construct the Dyson connection and decompose it into Hermitian and anti-Hermitian parts, identified respectively as {\it stretching } and {\it rotation } components. This decomposition cleanly separates the genuine physical metric deformations from the unitary gauge redundancies. Working with manifestly gauge-covariant states, we then derive the complex non-Hermitian Berry phase and the quantum geometric tensor (QGT), and show that the non-Hermitian geometric curvature originates from the non-commutativity of the stretching components at the operator level. We further analyse the geometric singularities near an exceptional point (EP) and uncover a distinct hierarchy of divergences. For a general two-level non-Hermitian model, the quantum metric tensor (QMT) exhibits a leading-order divergence $\sim |\epsilon_\mu|^{-2}$, while the Berry curvature shows a weaker, subleading divergence $\sim |\epsilon_\mu|^{-3/2}$, with $\epsilon_\mu$ denoting the parameter displacement from the EP along an individual parameter axis $\mu$. Finally, we examine physical realizations of this model, including the non-Hermitian Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) and Hatano–Nelson (HN) models, where exact analytical results confirm the predicted critical scaling laws and illustrate the metric-deformation-driven non-Hermitian geometries.

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

Beyond Scalar Rewards by Internalizing Reasoning into Score Distributions

Reward models are central to text-to-image post-training, but visual preference is subjective and better represented as a distribution over rubric scores than as a deterministic scalar. Existing scalar, score-token, and pairwise reward models over-compress uncertainty and fine-grained score differences, while reasoning-based generative rewards provide stronger judgments but are costly to deploy and difficult to use as direct optimization signals. We propose Z-Reward, a teacher-student reward modeling framework that decouples reasoning-heavy judgment from efficient reward deployment. The teacher is a large VLM that uses reasoning to infer rubric-aligned score distributions, and is trained with Group-wise Direct Score Optimization (GDSO), which combines policy-gradient rewards from distribution expectations with direct pointwise and pairwise supervision on score distributions and score gaps. The student is trained with Reasoning-Internalized Score Distillation (RISD), which transfers the teacher's reasoning-conditioned score distribution into a compact VLM without requiring explicit reasoning chains at inference time. On our internally annotated evaluation set, the 27B GDSO teacher reaches 89.6% human preference accuracy, outperforming SFT, RewardDance, and GRPO, while the 9B RISD student reaches 88.6%, outperforming the OPD baseline and closely matching the larger teacher. We further show that Z-Reward can serve as a differentiable reward signal for text-to-image optimization, yielding a 41.3% net human-preference improvement over the SFT baseline.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Confined migration induces non-lethal DNA damage in developing neurons

Migratory cells tend to have soft nuclei that deform and penetrate narrow spaces1,2. Extensive nuclear deformation during migration can cause nuclear-envelope rupture and DNA damage in cancer cells, which may contribute to malignant transformation during tumour progression3–6. However, the importance of DNA damage in physiological migration is less well understood. Here we demonstrate that the migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces. In contrast to many other migratory cells, these DSBs occur without detectable nuclear envelope rupture. Confined migration increases topoisomerase-IIβ covalently bound DSBs, and these lesions are repaired through non-homologous end-joining during brain development without causing cell death. Genome sequencing revealed that DSBs tend to occur at transcriptionally inactive regions. The deletion of ligase IV at the onset of neuronal migration leads to persistent DSB accumulation in cerebellar neurons with moderate transcriptional changes in genes related to synaptic function, neuronal development and stress and immune responses. The mutant mouse develops mild motor deficits in later life, suggesting that the DNA damage generated during normal brain development poses a potential disease risk if left unrepaired. The migration of neurons in developing cerebral and cerebellar cortices is accompanied by massive DNA double-strand breaks due to mechanostress during passage through narrow interstitial spaces.

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

HRDX: A Large-Scale Vector HD-Map Dataset

Reliable autonomous driving requires vectorized HD maps that are geometrically accurate, semantically rich, and scalable to long-horizon driving. However, existing public HD map datasets are limited in scale, provide sparse semantic attributes, and lack modalities such as aerial imagery that could enable new research directions. We present HRDX, a large-scale dataset for vector HD-map construction, spanning about 40 hours (1,400 km) of minimally overlapping drives, which is several times larger than prior public HD map datasets. Data is captured using six synchronized surround cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and centimeter-level RTK GNSS/IMU, and is further complemented by precisely aligned aerial orthoimagery. Annotations cover 10 vector map classes, complemented with over 20 semantic and topological attributes. To evaluate this richer ontology, we introduce the Composite Score (CS) to jointly assess geometric fidelity and attribute correctness. Benchmark experiments show that HRDX's scale improves online vector-map construction, and that aligned aerial imagery provides a useful structural prior: using aerial imagery at training and/or inference improves geometric map quality, while aerial-augmented teachers can transfer part of this benefit to camera-only students without increasing inference-time sensor requirements. HRDX is intended to support reproducible research on large-scale HD-map learning, multimodal BEV fusion, and training-time privileged information. HRDX dataset and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/honda-research-institute/HRDX

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.

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

Conditional Latent Diffusion Model with Fourier-based Motion Modelling for Virtual Population Synthesis

In-silico trials of medical devices require the generation of virtual populations of anatomies. In cardiovascular applications, virtual anatomy is typically represented as a 3D+t mesh sampled from a generative model. However, most existing mesh generators focus on static anatomy, while sequence models often lack explicit periodicity. To this end, we propose 4D F-MeshLDM, a conditional generative framework comprising a convolutional mesh VAE to encode meshes, a structural latent space that parameterises motion using a truncated Fourier series, and a diffusion prior that learns the latent distribution over Fourier coefficient tokens. By conditioning the diffusion process on clinical covariates via affine modulation, we enable controllable synthesis. Sampling tokens and performing inverse Fourier synthesis yield cycle-consistent latent trajectories, which can be decoded into 3D+t cardiac mesh sequences. Experiments on 5,000 UK Biobank subjects demonstrate that 4D F-MeshLDM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in anatomical fidelity and achieves near-zero cycle closure error. Furthermore, the generated cohorts accurately preserve clinical functional indices, highlighting the potential of our framework for reliable in-silico cardiac trials.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Active commuting, anxiety symptoms and mental wellbeing: a dose-response study

Climate change draws attention to the planetary health perspective in sport and exercise sciences, that is, to physical activity that supports both human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Active commuting is a sustainable form of physical activity with well-established somatic health benefits. However, more knowledge is needed on its relationship with mental health. We examined dose-response associations between active commuting, anxiety symptoms, and mental wellbeing among Finnish adults, and whether green commuting environment moderates these relationships. We used data from the cross-sectional Environment and Health Survey collected in June-September 2023 in the ten largest cities in Finland. Employed participants with data on anxiety symptoms (Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7, GAD-7), mental wellbeing (World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, WHO-5), commuting profile over a year (mode, frequency, distance, and perceived greenness along the commute route), and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors were included (n=1,672; mean age 45.3 years; 53.8% women). Active commuting was defined as travelling the entire commute by walking or cycling (including e-biking) that was converted into approximated annual km/week and MET-h/week. We used linear and logistic regression with restricted cubic splines to evaluate dose-response associations, adjusted for key covariates. The role of perceived greenness was tested using an active commuting x commute greenness interaction term. We found no dose-response relationships between active commuting and anxiety symptoms or mental wellbeing in any of the models. No effect modification by commute greenness was observed. More research on how active commuting may support planetary health from a mental health perspective is needed.

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

Attention is Just Another Name for Coupling?: A Fast-Slow ODE Perspective on Hierarchical Pretraining

arXiv:2606.16730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal self-attention is a coupling mechanism: each token's hidden state is updated by a learned mixture of preceding tokens at the same timescale. This paper asks whether a second, temporally slower coupling-a slow sub-system operating on a temporally-downsampled view of the sequence and fed back into the fast path through a zero-initialised gate-complements it. The question is framed in the language of singularly perturbed ordinary differential equations (ODEs), where the fast variable $x$ evolves at the token rate, the slow variable $y$ evolves at one update per $P$ tokens, and the timescale ratio $\varepsilon = 1/P$ is enforced structurally by causal block-mean pooling. The paper instantiates the fast-slow ODE formalism as a concrete neural network: a fast path of standard causal attention over $T$ tokens, a slow path of full attention over $T/P$ pooled tokens ($P^2 \times$ cheaper per layer), and a zero-initialised additive gate. In addition, under a linear-generator assumption on the fast dynamics, we prove that the equilibrium manifold $x = \phi(y)$ is exactly the master-equation (ME) stationary distribution $p_{\mathrm{st}}(y)$; in that regime a learned MLP $\phi_\theta(y)$ is a variational approximation of it (the trained block is not a generator, so this identity is the structured limit, not a claim about the network as trained). Empirically, at $500$k tokens the coupling is neutral – the gate stays closed and the coupled and frozen ablations are within run-to-run noise – at a wall-clock cost comparable to a dense baseline. The contribution is the precise, gap-marked mapping itself, not a performance gain.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Radial Basis Functions for PDEs with Dirac Delta Sources

arXiv:2606.12735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a machine learning method for solving forward and inverse Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). When applied to PDEs with Dirac delta functions in the forcing terms, boundary conditions, or initial conditions, PINNs require approximating them with smooth surrogate functions, a practice that can introduce significant modeling errors. In this work, we exploit the interpretation of PINNs as Residual Least Squares (RLS) methods and show that this perspective enables direct treatment of Dirac delta terms by integrating the weak-form equation. Among RLS formulations other than PINN, we focus on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) expansion (also known as a single-layer RBF Network). We show that while integrating out the Dirac delta in PINNs causes residuals to fail to converge to zero, RBF-RLS consistently provides good forward and inverse solutions to transport problems. We explain this finding using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. We test both approaches on linear PDEs that represent groundwater flow and transport in porous media and rivers. We solve inverse problems to fit synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, and real-world measurements.

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

Comprehensive pKa Data Augmentation from Limited Real Data through an Engineered Models-Quantum Framework

arXiv:2606.17077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proton dissociation constants (pKa) are critical for functional molecule discovery and molecular modeling. Building on iBonD, the largest experimental pKa database established, we and other researchers have developed several methods including machine-learning-based empirical prediction and high-accuracy energy calculations. Despite this foundation, the rapid augmentation of high-quality pKa data remains fundamentally constrained. As part of this work, we performed large-scale regression-based pKa prediction on unlabeled molecular datasets using a collection of extensively optimized machine-learning models. The results indicate that, since the feature distributions of unlabeled molecular datasets, the pKa data distribution approximates normality, with extreme scarcity of tail-region samples. Although such augmentation is highly valuable for improving overall data availability and predictive modeling, it remains insufficient for efficiently discovering molecules with broad-spectrum pKa properties. To address this, we explore the targeted generation of molecules with sparse pKa properties from the vast chemical space. Given that traditional continuous latent space VAE-RNN methods for molecular generation suffer from insufficient stability and fail to demonstrate clear advantages in complementing sparse data, we design and implement a quantum-assisted sparse-pKa molecular generation. Feasibility is validated on a simulated quantum annealer, and superior extreme-value sampling is further achieved on physical coherent Ising machines (CIMs). (to be continued)