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

Atom–photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom

arXiv:2605.28968v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate atom–photon entanglement using a single cesium atom trapped in an optical tweezer. Entanglement is generated by resonant excitation and subsequent spontaneous decay, which entangles the atomic Zeeman state with photon polarization. The photon is collected with a high numerical aperture objective (NA = 0.55) and coupled into a single-mode fiber, enabling atom photon measurements and measurement of the Bell-state fidelity. We obtain raw entanglement fidelity of ${\mathcal F} = 0.942(16)$ and inferred fidelity of ${\mathcal F}_inf = 0.962(26)$ after correcting independently characterized atom measurement errors. Compared with related free-space experiments using $^{87}$Rb, the multilevel structure of the relevant excited state in $^{133}$Cs requires the use of a single short excitation pulse in each entanglement attempt in order to suppress unwanted re-excitation. These results establish a free-space Cs atom–photon interface and provide a step toward dual-species Rb–Cs quantum networking.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

One-Shot Novel View and Pose Human Image Synthesis via 3D Prior Guided Diffusion Model

This paper addresses the challenge of one-shot novel view and pose human image synthesis. The existing methods transfer the reference human image to a target pose using a set of 2D pose keypoints or synthesize human images based on generalizable human NeRF which uses human model priors to extract point-wise features. However, pose transfer based methods can not handle complex human pose using ambiguous 2D pose as the condition, while generalizable human NeRFs may be inaccurate to recover occluded/invisiable human parts without extracted reliable features. To solve these problems, we propose a novel approach for novel view and pose synthesis from a singe human image via conditional denoising diffusion model. Our diffusion model divides the novel view and pose synthesis problem into a sequence of conditional denoising steps. Specifically, to generate humans with complex and arbitrary poses, we introduce 3D human priors, i.e., 3D normal map and color prompt, as geometry and color conditions into the generation process. By transferring the reference human into the target human with a series of diffusion steps, our diffusion model enables high-quality synthesis including the occluded/invisible parts. Further, we propose a self-reconstruction based customized refinement to enhance fine details when tested on novel persons.Experimental results on different public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods and also shows better generalization ability across datasets. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Yankeegsj/3DPGDM.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Statistical Compass

arXiv:2606.11282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This monograph develops probability and stochastic-process ideas as a translation language for statistics: from designed observations and data objects to targets, stability statements, inference, and use. The chapters move from motivating examples and randomization through probability measures, kernels, likelihoods, data objects, weak convergence, empirical fields, functional data, M- and Z-estimation, testing, local approximations, event-time processes, and prediction. Historical and biomedical examples are used to keep abstract objects tied to records, mechanisms, and decisions. The aim is to give readers a common grammar for classical probability, modern data structures, and statistical practice.

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

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.

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

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Challenges and progress in RNA velocity: Comparative analysis across multiple biological contexts

by Sarah Ancheta, Leah Dorman, Guillaume Le Treut, Abel Gurung, Greg Huber, Loïc A. Royer, Alejandro Granados, Merlin Lange Single-cell RNA sequencing is revolutionizing our understanding of cell state dynamics, allowing researchers to capture and quantify the transcriptomic profile of a single cell at a specific timepoint. Among the computational techniques used to predict cellular trajectories, RNA velocity has emerged as a predominant tool for modeling transcriptional dynamics. RNA velocity leverages the mRNA maturation process to generate velocity vectors that predict the likely future state of a cell, offering insights into cellular differentiation, aging, and disease progression. Although this technique has shown promise across biological fields, the performance accuracy varies depending on the RNA velocity method and dataset. We established a comparative pipeline and analyzed the performance of five RNA velocity methods on three datasets based on local consistency, method agreement, identification of driver genes, and robustness to sequencing depth. This benchmark provides a resource for scientists to understand the strengths and limitations of different RNA velocity methods.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Gaussian Mixture Attention: Linear-Time Sequence Mixing via Probabilistic Latent Routing

arXiv:2606.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The dense token-to-token interaction pattern of standard dot-product attention remains a central bottleneck in scaling Transformer architectures to long contexts. We introduce Gaussian Mixture Attention (GMA), a probabilistic attention-style sequence mixer that replaces explicit pairwise query–key comparison with routing through $K$ learned Gaussian mixture components. Queries and keys are mapped to posterior responsibility vectors over a shared latent routing space; their overlap defines an implicit responsibility-space affinity, while values are written into and read from a $K$-slot latent memory. By exploiting the associativity of matrix multiplication, GMA avoids materializing the induced $N\times N$ affinity matrix and instead uses two responsibility matrices whose dominant activation storage scales as $\mathcal{O}(NK)$ rather than $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ for fixed $K$. We formulate bidirectional and causal variants of GMA, provide an end-to-end differentiable parameterization of the Gaussian mixture components, and analyze its responsibility-modulated gradient structure, constrained non-negative low-rank affinity interpretation, and local routing stability. Empirically, GMA exhibits the intended fixed-$K$ linear memory scaling and is competitive with attention-style baselines on long-context classification, while causal GMA improves over tested linear/random-feature attention variants on WikiText-103 but remains behind optimized causal SDPA and Mamba in the current implementation. Analysis of learned responsibilities further shows broad component usage and moderate alignment with surface-form token categories, supporting GMA as a probabilistic, interpretable, fixed-$K$ linear-time attention-style alternative rather than a universal replacement for optimized softmax attention or state-space models.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Mixing Makes Markovian Contexts Cheap for Linear Bandits

arXiv:2603.12530v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that when contexts are drawn i.i.d., linear contextual bandits can be reduced to single-context linear bandits. This ``contexts are cheap'' perspective is highly advantageous, as it allows for sharper finite-time analyses and leverages mature techniques from the linear bandit literature, such as those for misspecification and adversarial corruption. However, this reduction crucially relies on the independence of contexts and does not extend to settings with temporally correlated (e.g., Markovian) contexts, which arise frequently in practice. Motivated by applications with temporally correlated availability, we extend this perspective to linear bandits with Markovian context processes, where the action set evolves via an exogenous Markov chain. Our main contribution is a reduction that applies under uniform geometric ergodicity. We construct a stationary surrogate action set to solve the problem using a standard linear bandit oracle, employing a delayed-update scheme to control the bias induced by the nonstationary conditional context distributions. We further provide a phased algorithm for unknown stationary distributions that learns the surrogate mapping online. In both settings, we obtain a high-probability worst-case regret bound matching that of the underlying linear bandit oracle in sufficiently fast mixing regimes. We then validate our results on a real-world instance, where we show practical gains over a LinUCB baseline.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

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

PHINN: Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for Rare-Event Time Series Generation

arXiv:2606.15452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rare events in time series are critical to model but hard to learn due to data scarcity. Current generative models struggle with extreme values. We observe that rare events leave distinct topological fingerprints - transitions in Betti numbers from point-cloud embeddings - that are more stable and discriminative than statistical moments. We introduce PHINN, a flow-matching framework using dynamic Betti curves as conditioning signals and a persistence landscape loss for homology consistency. It scales to multivariate data, includes a natural-language interface to set Betti targets, supports cross-domain meta-learning and few-shot generation, and provides certified adversarial robustness. On financial, epidemiological, and multi-modal benchmarks, PHINN outperforms statistical and diffusion baselines in topological fidelity (beta-RMSE down 41-63%, transition accuracy up 84%) and matches jump-diffusion models in tail coverage while exceeding them in shape fidelity. All results have 95% confidence intervals.

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

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

作者:

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

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

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

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

Hierarchical symmetry selects log-Poisson cascades: classification, uniqueness, and stability

arXiv:2604.01632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Within i.i.d. multiplicative cascades, a single axiom – the hierarchical symmetry, a linear contraction on incremental scaling exponents – is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the cascade multiplier to be log-Poisson. We prove: (1) a characterization theorem determining the log-Poisson law with explicit parameters, within the class of all multipliers with finite lattice moments; (2) a classification theorem locating the log-Poisson class inside the log-infinitely-divisible family and identifying the mechanism by which every rival sub-family fails the symmetry; (3) a stability theorem with sharp constants – $(1+\beta)^{1/2}$ when the limiting increment is known, $\sqrt{2}$ when it is fitted – and (4) an unconditional propagation theorem transferring the bound to the multiplier distribution at the sharp rate $\Theta(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$, with a matching lower bound. Beyond independence, the classification extends exactly at the level of asymptotic statistics (limiting cumulant generating function, large deviations, multifractal spectrum) and provably not at the level of laws: an explicit stationary ergodic Markov multiplier satisfies the symmetry exactly with a non-log-Poisson marginal, while exchangeable multipliers collapse to the i.i.d. log-Poisson cascade and finite-state Markov multipliers cannot satisfy the symmetry at all. In the continuous category of exactly scale-invariant log-infinitely-divisible multifractal random measures, no finite moment window of structure-function exponents identifies the cascade class, whereas at the level of the scale-invariance generator the symmetry selects exactly the Barral-Mandelbrot compound Poisson cascade, with scale-ratio-free stability constants. The proofs reduce to second-moment identities on [0,1] via the change of variables $u = e^{kx}$, boundedness of the multiplier, and multiplicative couplings.

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

Benchmarking Agentic Review Systems

A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.

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

Creating squeezed and non-classical collective motional many-body states through stroboscopic Rydberg dressing

arXiv:2606.17849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing conditional quantum operations, e.g., quantum gates, for quantum computing and simulation requires controlled interactions between particles. Often, these interactions depend on the interparticle distance, and accordingly, an uncertainty of the relative particle position may translate into gate infidelities. We consider here a quantum computing platform based on an array of neutral atoms and present a method that allows to reduce the uncertainty of all interatomic distances. Our approach exploits the coupling between atomic motion and stroboscopically excited atomic Rydberg states. It allows to collectively squeeze the modes corresponding to interatomic displacements, thereby reducing distance fluctuations down to a fraction of the motional vacuum state. Furthermore, the method permits the creation of non-classical states with substantial Wigner negativity. These correlated states may allow reducing motional decoherence, increasing gate fidelity, and potentially yield a resource for quantum-enhanced metrology.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Effectiveness and Safety of Bempedoic Acid Across Clinically Relevant Subgroups: Insights from the CLEAR Taiwan Study

Background Despite available lipid-lowering therapies (LLT), many patients fail to achieve low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. This gap persists across clinically relevant subgroups. Bempedoic acid has demonstrated effective LDL-C lowering with a favorable safety profile in the CLEAR Taiwan study; however, its effects across subgroups in Asian populations remains limited. Methods The phase IV CLEAR Taiwan study (NCT06925100) enrolled patients with inadequately controlled hypercholesterolemia who received bempedoic acid for 12 weeks in addition to background LLT. This analysis evaluated changes in lipid parameters, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and safety outcomes in clinically relevant subgroups, including cardiovascular risk, diabetes, age, statin tolerance, and sex. Results A total of 180 patients were included. Bempedoic acid achieved significant LDL-C reductions in all subgroups. Numerically greater LDL-C reductions were observed in primary prevention, statin-intolerant, younger (< 65 years), and female patients, while comparable reductions were observed across diabetes status. Reductions in non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B were consistent with LDL-C findings. Significant decreases in hsCRP were observed in all subgroups, with numerically greater reductions in patients aged < 65 years and those without diabetes. Bempedoic acid was well tolerated, with a low incidence of adverse events and no new safety signals identified. Changes in liver enzymes, renal function, and uric acid were minimal within subgroups. Conclusion Subgroup analyses from the CLEAR Taiwan study demonstrate consistent efficacy and safety of bempedoic acid across clinically relevant subgroups and support its use as a flexible option to address residual gaps in lipid management.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Strategic PAC Learnability via Geometric Definability

arXiv:2605.13426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic) hypothesis class depends on the complexities of the underlying hypothesis class and the cost structure governing feasible manipulations. Prior work has shown that in several natural settings, such as linear classifiers with norm costs, the induced complexity can be controlled. We begin by showing that such guarantees fail in general - even in simple cases: there exist hypothesis classes of VC dimension $1$ on the real line such that, even under the simplest interval neighborhoods, the induced class has infinite VC dimension. Thus, strategic behavior can turn an easy learning problem into a non-learnable one. To overcome this, we introduce structure via a geometric definability assumption: both the hypothesis class and the cost-induced neighborhood relation can be defined by first-order formulas over $\mathbb{R}_{\mathtt{exp}}$. Intuitively, this means that hypotheses and costs can be described using arithmetic operations, exponentiation, logarithms, and comparisons. This captures a broad range of natural classes and cost functions, including $\ell_p$ distances, Wasserstein distance, and information-theoretic divergences. Under this assumption, we prove that learnability is preserved, with sample complexity controlled by the complexity of the defining formulas.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

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

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Information-Theoretic Decomposition for Multimodal Interaction Learning

Multimodal learning hinges on capturing redundant, unique, and synergistic information across modalities, which collectively constitute multimodal interactions. A critical yet underexplored challenge is that these implicit interactions vary dynamically across samples. In this work, we present the first systematic, information-theoretic analysis highlighting why learning these dynamic, sample-specific interactions is critical for effective multimodal learning. Our analysis further reveals deficits in conventional paradigms at learning these distinct interaction types: modality ensemble approaches struggle to capture synergy, while joint learning paradigms often under-utilize redundant information. This highlights the need for an approach that can adaptively learn from different interaction types on a per-sample basis. To this end, we propose Decomposition-based Multimodal Interaction Learning (DMIL), a novel paradigm that explicitly models and learns from sample-specific interactions. First, we design a variational decomposition architecture to isolate the constituent interaction components. Second, we employ a new learning strategy that leverages these explicit interaction components in a fine-tuning process to achieve comprehensive interaction learning. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and architectures demonstrate that DMIL consistently achieves superior performance by adapting to holistic sample-specific interactions. Our framework is flexible and broadly applicable, establishing an interaction-centric paradigm for multimodal learning. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/DMIL.