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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Explicit Quantum Circuit Simulation of Nonlinear 1-Dimensional Fluid with Carleman-linearized Boltzmann Method

arXiv:2606.12770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computation of fluid dynamics has attracted growing attention as a key application of fault-tolerant quantum computers anticipated in the coming decade, with lattice Boltzmann methods emerging as a particularly promising approach. Explicit and efficient elementary-gate-level circuit simulations, however, have so far been demonstrated only in the linear case. Here we include the leading nonlinearity through second-order Carleman linearization of the one-dimensional Boltzmann equation, and demonstrate, via explicit quantum-circuit simulation, the preparation of the final-time state using a Taylor-expansion-based ODE solver based on the quantum singular value transformation. With this construction, we analyze the gate and qubit complexities, which scale logarithmically with the grid size, the nonlinearity captured by the higher-order Carleman linearization, and the practical utility of higher-order expansions in the Taylor ODE solver. The construction provides a concrete baseline for computational cost reduction and further developments such as extensions to higher dimensions, complex geometries, and the extraction of physical quantities, towards industrially useful quantum CFD.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying framework for quantum simulation algorithms for time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics

arXiv:2411.03180v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in simulating time-dependent Hamiltonians using quantum algorithms, driven by diverse applications, such as quantum adiabatic computing. While techniques for simulating time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics are well-established, time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics is less explored and it is unclear how to systematically organize existing methods and to find new methods. Sambe-Howland's continuous clock elegantly transforms time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics into time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics, which means that by taking different discretizations, existing methods for time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics can be exploited for time-dependent dynamics. In this work, we systemically investigate how Sambe-Howland's clock can serve as a unifying framework for simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics. Firstly, we demonstrate the versatility of this approach by showcasing its compatibility with analog quantum computing and digital quantum computing. Secondly, for digital quantum computers, we illustrate how this framework, combined with time-independent methods (e.g., product formulas, multi-product formulas, qDrift, and LCU-Taylor), can facilitate the development of efficient algorithms for simulating time-dependent dynamics. This framework allows us to (a) resolve the problem of finding minimum-gate time-dependent product formulas; (b) establish a unified picture of both Suzuki's and Huyghebaert and De Raedt's approaches; (c) generalize Huyghebaert and De Raedt's first and second-order formula to arbitrary orders; (d) answer an unsolved question in establishing time-dependent multi-product formulas; (e) and recover continuous qDrift on the same footing as time-independent qDrift. Thirdly, we demonstrate the efficacy of our newly developed higher-order Huyghebaert and De Raedt's algorithm through digital adiabatic simulation.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Recursive perturbation approach to time-convolutionless master equations: Explicit construction of generalized Lindblad generators for arbitrary open systems

arXiv:2506.04095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a recursive perturbative expansion for the time-convolutionless (TCL) generator of an open quantum system in a generalized Lindblad form. This formulation provides a systematic approach to derive the generator at arbitrary order while preserving a Lindblad-like structure, without imposing assumptions on the system or environment beyond an initially uncorrelated state. The generator is written, at all orders, in a canonical form, which also corresponds to the minimal dissipation condition, which uniquely specifies the decomposition of the generator into Hamiltonian and dissipative contributions. To validate the method and show its effectiveness in addressing non-Markovian dynamics and strong-coupling effects, we compute the generator explicitly up to fourth order.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LASA: A Weak Supervision Method for Open-Vocabulary Scene Sketch Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary scene sketch semantic segmentation aims to assign dense semantic labels to sparse line drawings based on flexible category vocabularies specified at inference time, without relying on pixel-level annotations during training. Unlike natural images, sketches lack texture and color cues, making semantic understanding heavily dependent on stroke layout and spatial configuration, a challenge that renders single-layer vision-language features inherently unstable. Our key observation is that attention maps from different Vision Transformer layers encode complementary spatial cues: shallow layers capture global structural layouts, while deeper layers focus on local stroke intersections and object parts. This suggests that cross-layer aggregation provides a more robust structural prior than any individual layer alone. Leveraging this insight, we propose a structure-aware framework built upon Layer-wise Accumulated Structural Attention (LASA), which aggregates multi-layer attention to guide hierarchical semantic alignment under weak supervision and refine predictions during inference. Experiments on FS-COCO, SFSD, and FrISS show that LASA improves mIoU by $+3.43$, $+8.01$, and $+15.74$ over the prior weakly supervised baselines, demonstrating consistent gains in both segmentation accuracy and spatial coherence. Our source code will be made publicly available.

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

Metric Match: A Subset Selection Approach to Evaluating LLM Judge Reliability

arXiv:2606.15029v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM judges are used to reduce the need for costly human labor in evaluating open-ended text generation. However, the reliability of these judges depends critically on their alignment with human raters – a property that itself depends on costly human annotations. In this work, we develop a method (Metric Match) for estimating correlation-based reliability metrics of LLM judges from limited annotations. Metric Match selects a subset of samples for human annotation such that the subset matches the population reliability metric with respect to acquired synthetic labels. We empirically show that Metric Match achieves a win-rate of 0.838 against random subset selection across four different correlation metrics and 15 datasets, with an 18.7% decrease in average estimation error and reduces annotation needs by 32.5%. We provide a cost model and highlight a medical case study where our method saves $1,041.67 compared to random selection for expert annotation. Further, we shift our task from reliability estimation to reliability classification of whether a given judge is above a deployment threshold, outperforming random selection with Metric Match. All project code is publicly available, and we additionally provide an installable package for ease of use.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

作者:

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

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

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Beyond Tokenization: Direct Timestep Embedding and Contrastive Alignment for Time-Series Question Answering

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have given rise to time-series question answering (TSQA), which formulates time-series analysis as natural-language question answering. However, directly feeding raw numerical series into LLMs suffers from a tokenization bottleneck: Byte Pair Encoding fragments continuous values into unstable tokens whose embeddings lack meaningful metric structure, resulting in the loss of magnitude, scale, and trend information. Prior methods use patch-based encoders that split the series into fixed windows, locking in one granularity that breaks patterns and hides exact timesteps, through a separate module that rarely transfers across datasets with different lengths or sampling rates. To address this challenge, we propose CADE (Contrastive Alignment with Direct Embedding), a novel framework for TSQA built upon two key components: direct timestep embedding and semantic alignment. The proposed framework maps each timestep directly into the LLM embedding space through a point-wise linear encoder and MLP projector, preserving exact index-level access while eliminating the need for patching and padding. To further bridge the semantic gap between time-series and language representations, we introduce a novel one-directional supervised contrastive loss that aligns time-series embeddings with frozen class-name text anchors. Experimental results on the public Time-MQA benchmark demonstrate that our framework consistently improves performance across six TSQA tasks, outperforming both open-source and proprietary LLM baselines.

10.
Science (Express) 2026-06-18

Indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with tin oxide recombination layer and electrodes | Science

作者: 未知作者

Indium-based transparent conductive oxides are widely used as electrodes and recombination layers in perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, yet their scalability is constrained by indium scarcity and sputtering-induced damage. Here we report high efficiency and stable indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells enabled by reactive plasma deposited tin oxide (RPD-SnO x ). For RPD-SnO x as the recombination layer, a certified efficiency of 33.6% is achieved. Fully indium-free tandems that used RPD-SnO x as both recombination layer and electrodes delivering a champion PCE of 33.2% (1 cm 2 ) and a mini-module with a certified efficiency of 31.0% (207.9 cm 2 ). Dense and uniform self-assembled monolayer anchoring enabled by RPD-SnO x suppressed non-radiative recombination and reduced halide migration. Indium-free mini-modules exhibited high thermal, damp-heat, and outdoor operational stability and retained 65% of their maximum initial efficiency after 105 days of outdoor operation.

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

A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer

arXiv:2606.17491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

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

EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards

Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have enabled impressive reasoning and perception abilities, yet most existing training pipelines still depend on human-curated data or externally verified reward models, limiting their autonomy and scalability. In this work, we strive to improve LMM reasoning capabilities in a purely unsupervised fashion (without any annotated data or reward distillation). To this end, we propose a self-evolving framework, named EvoLMM, that instantiates two cooperative agents from a single backbone model: a Proposer, which generates diverse, image-grounded questions, and a Solver, which solves them through internal consistency, where learning proceeds through a continuous self-rewarding process. This dynamic feedback encourages both the generation of informative queries and the refinement of structured reasoning without relying on ground-truth or human judgments. When using the popular Qwen2.5-VL as the base model, our EvoLMM yields consistent gains upto $\sim$3\% on multimodal math-reasoning benchmarks, including ChartQA, MathVista, and MathVision, using only raw training images. We hope our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline easing future research in self-improving LMMs in a fully-unsupervised fashion. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/EvoLMM.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AdaSR: Adaptive Streaming Reasoning with Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization

Large reasoning models typically follow a read-then-think paradigm: they observe the complete input, reason over a static context, and then produce the answer. Yet many real-world scenarios are inherently dynamic, such as audio and video stream, where information arrives as a continuous stream and models must reason, update, and respond under partial observations. Recent streaming reasoning methods allow models to think while reading, but they largely rely on supervised imitation of pre-constructed trajectories, which limits their flexibility. In this paper, we propose AdaSR, an adaptive streaming reasoning framework that enables models to reason during input streaming and perform final deliberation once the stream is complete, learning when to think, and how much computation to allocate across different stages. To optimize this hierarchical reasoning process, we introduce Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), which decomposes policy optimization into streaming reasoning and deep reasoning phases, providing more fine-grained advantage assignment instead of uniformly distributing a single sequence-level advantage over all tokens. HRPO integrates format, accuracy, and adaptive thinking rewards to enforce valid reasoning protocols, preserve final task performance, and encourage latency-aware computation allocation. Experiments show that AdaSR achieves a better balance among reasoning accuracy, computational efficiency, and streaming latency compared with supervised fine-tuning baseline. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/AdaSR.

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

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AdsMind: A Physics-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Self-Correcting Discovery of Adsorption Configurations on Heterogeneous Catalyst Surfaces

arXiv:2606.19152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying the lowest-energy surface-adsorbate configuration is critical for modeling heterogeneous catalysis, yet exhaustive exploration with ab initio calculations is computationally prohibitive. Machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) accelerate structural relaxation but leave the search over the vast configurational space a major bottleneck, and open-loop large language model (LLM) agents lack a physics-grounded feedback mechanism to correct erroneous initial guesses. We propose AdsMind (Adsorption configuration discovery with Machine intelligence and relaxation feedback), a closed-loop multi-agent framework that enables autonomous error correction through MLFF relaxation feedback. Across four LLM backends, AdsMind achieves consistently high search reliability, with success rates of 100% and 98.8% on the benchmarks AA20 and OCD-GMAE62. Relative to its single-pass (1-Shot) ablation it reduces cross-backend energy dispersion, and it uses only 4.11 and 4.67 MLFF relaxations per case, respectively – an approximately 14-fold reduction over heuristic enumeration baselines. Density functional theory (DFT) validation using VASP/PBE on six representative AA20 systems shows that the reported open-loop Adsorb-Agent outputs exhibit qualitative adsorption-energy sign errors for molecular adsorbates, whereas AdsMind preserves the correct sign in all tested cases with closer quantitative agreement. AdsMind thus delivers reliability, self-reflection, and interpretability simultaneously, supporting more DFT-informed autonomous chemistry workflows.

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

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.16434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

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

Evaluating LLM Personalization via Semantic Constraint Verification

Current evaluation paradigms for Large Language Model (LLM) personalization rely heavily on brittle surface-matching metrics or computationally expensive LLM-as-a-judge protocols, both of which lack interpretability. To address these limitations, we introduce Natural Language Inference Constraint Verification (NLICV), a scalable, semantically invariant framework that maps sentence meanings to truth-condition sets to verify personalization constraints via a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model. Moving beyond binary scoring, NLICV categorizes LLM behaviors into four distinct modes: personalization, generalization, sycophancy, and failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLICV aligns closely with human annotations while drastically reducing the latency and token costs associated with LLM judges (up to 2100 inference speedup). Finally, through an ablation-based procedure, NLICV pinpoints the exact sentences driving the constraint verification, yielding faithful, understandable evidence for its evaluations.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Indirect Computing Model with Indirect Formal Method

作者:

This paper,from the perspective of a collaborative intelligent computing system formed by combining human-computer interface and collaborative computing programs, discusses the principles of optimized cloud computing technology supported by the combination of an indirect computing model and an indirect formal method. On the basis of systematically reviewing the influence of previous theoretical achievements Turing's computability theory,Kleene's formal theory of small strings,von Neumann's digital computer architecture and Turing's hypothesis on AI judgment on the mainstream general-purpose digital computer paradigm,the author focuses on introducing an indirect computing model and an indirect formal theory compatible with both large and small strings. Using Chinese information data as an example,the design concept of a collaborative intelligent computing system prototype is presented. The significance is that this achievement facilitates optimization of cloud computing from data centers to knowledge centers.

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

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

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

Certified Finite-Shot Operating Windows for Virtual Distillation and Symmetry Verification

arXiv:2606.15464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error mitigation methods are usually compared through their infinite-shot bias, but on real devices the comparison is decided by finite sampling budgets, estimator instabilities, and per-shot resource costs. We develop a finite-shot operating-window theory that makes this comparison certifiable for virtual distillation (VD) and symmetry verification (SV): for each method we derive a mean-squared-error law with explicit, non-asymptotic remainder constants. For VD, the law captures the statistical bias and denominator instability of its quotient estimator, with a concentration certificate locating the sample size beyond which the quotient is trustworthy; for SV, it isolates the bias floor left by undetectable errors and the sampling penalty set by the acceptance probability. A selection trichotomy classifies any two-method comparison into a tie, uniform dominance, or a genuine tradeoff with a certified crossing window, including a self-consistency test that rejects spurious crossings. The theory makes falsifiable predictions – operating-window locations scaling as $p^{-2}$ or $p^{-1}$ in the noise rate, and the sign pattern of all pairwise comparisons – which exact white-box experiments confirm with fitted exponent $-1.97$ against the predicted $-2$ and with $300/300$ sign agreement, within a pre-registered analysis whose single failed gate, an over-strict all-instance criterion, is reported and audited in full. Gate-level simulation and archived runs on two IBM backends then test the windows under device conditions: idealized VD windows exist, but realistic interferometry overhead and denominator instability erase them, and calibrated SV is the practical winner in the tested QAOA instances. This absence of a universal winner is not a failure of mitigation; it is the regime structure that certified operating windows predict.

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

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

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

On the Role of Computation in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05999v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies which use more compute can solve problems and generalize to longer-horizon tasks that are outside the scope of policies with less compute. Building on prior work in algorithmic learning and model-free planning, we propose a minimal architecture that can use a variable amount of compute. Our experiments complement our theory. On a set 31 different tasks spanning online and offline RL, we show that $(1)$ this architecture achieves stronger performance simply by using more compute, and $(2)$ stronger generalization on longer-horizon test tasks compared to standard feedforward networks or deep residual network using up to 5 times more parameters.

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

PI-Hunter: Automated Red-Teaming for Exposing and Localizing Prompt Injections

arXiv:2606.12737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving into agentic systems that interact with external tools and environments, introducing new security risks such as indirect prompt injection attacks through untrusted external sources. Existing defenses mainly focus on blocking malicious content at inference time, and current red-teaming methods primarily optimize attack success. As a result, developers have limited visibility into how latent prompt injections emerge and propagate through agents. We propose PI-Hunter, an automated agentic auditing framework for proactive vulnerability exposure in LLM agents. PI-Hunter constructs realistic source-aware test cases and iteratively evolves them through feedback-driven exploration to induce agents to retrieve and reveal latent malicious instructions embedded within external environments. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, agent architectures, attacks, and defenses demonstrate that PI-Hunter substantially improves vulnerability exposure and attack-surface coverage over strong automated red-teaming baselines, while remaining effective under existing prompt injection defenses.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Maternal-Fetal immune networks and viral signatures in the healthy amniotic cavity

The intrauterine environment has traditionally been viewed as a privileged site protected by the placental barrier. However, emerging evidence suggests that early in utero microbial exposure may prime the developing fetal immune system. Here, using target-enriched metagenomics and high-dimensional proteomics, we characterized the intra-amniotic viral landscape and immune networks in 114 healthy pregnancies including both normal and anomalous fetuses. We identify a sparse yet heterogeneous human viral signature in 26% of samples, predominantly composed of Herpesviridae, Polyomaviridae, and Picornaviridae. Although viral reads abundance was associated with fetal abnormalities, viral detection generally did not induce overt inflammatory activation, supporting a state of immune homeostasis within the amniotic cavity. Instead, viral presence was associated with subtle and selective immune modulation, including altered inducible antimicrobial peptide expression (HBD-2 and HBD-3), coupled with an attenuation of regulatory cytokines. Our results further reveal that the amniotic immune environment is primarily governed by gestational age, transitioning from a Th1-predominant "alert" phase to innate-readiness preceding parturition. These findings suggest that fragments of viral genetic material within the amniotic cavity may contribute to fetal immune instruction without triggering overt inflammation, providing a foundational framework for understanding how "silent" viral-exposure during gestation influences the developmental origins of neonatal immunity.