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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Reliability-Calibrated Edge-IoT Early Fault Warning for Rotating Machinery with a Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer

arXiv:2601.21293v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems increasingly rely on distributed vibration sensing to support predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. In practical deployments, however, raw signal upload is costly and alarm decisions must be made locally under limited computation, changing operating conditions, and strict nuisance-alarm budgets. This paper presents a reliability-calibrated edge-IoT early-warning framework, in which a compact Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT) acts as the representation module and an extreme value theory (EVT) layer converts streaming anomaly scores into event-level alarm episodes. PG-TMT combines a depthwise-separable convolutional stem, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch, and a lightweight local Transformer to capture transient, long-horizon, and multichannel degradation cues under batch-size-one inference. To improve auditability, temporal attention is projected to the frequency domain and softly aligned with analytical bearing fault-order bands. EVT calibration, dual-threshold hysteresis, and trimmed-tail fitting provide controllable false-alarm intensity even when healthy calibration data are imperfect. Experiments on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot demonstrate that the proposed framework improves PR-AUC, reduces detection delay under a controlled nuisance-alarm budget, and remains robust to structured interference, metadata uncertainty, compound fault mixtures, and domain transfer. With a sub-1 MB footprint and Jetson p99 latency below 7 ms, the framework supports calibrated and interpretable early warnings for IIoT predictive maintenance.

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

Fusion of Pervasive RF Data with Spatial Images via Vision Transformers for Enhanced Mapping in Smart Cities

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach that integrates the DINOv2 architecture to improve building mapping by combining (possibly erroneous) maps from open-source platforms with pervasive radio frequency (RF) data collected from multiple wireless user equipments and base stations. Unlike prior methods, our approach leverages a vision transformer-based architecture to jointly process both RF and map modalities within a unified framework, effectively capturing spatial dependencies and structural priors for enhanced mapping accuracy. For the evaluation purposes, we employ a synthetic dataset co-produced by Huawei. To address the challenges associated with real-world data imperfections, we introduce controlled noise to its RF data so as to simulate real-world conditions. Additionally, we develop and train a model that leverages only aggregated path loss information to tackle the mapping problem. We measure the results according to three performance metrics: the Jaccard index (intersection over union, IoU), the Hausdorff distance, and the Chamfer distance. Our design achieves a macro IoU of 65.3%, significantly surpassing (i) the erroneous maps baseline, which yields 40.1%, (ii) an RF-only method from the literature, which yields 37.3%, and (iii) a non-AI fusion baseline that we designed which yields 42.2%. The comparative evaluation highlights the limitations of relying solely on RF data or on spatial data, as well as the effectiveness that AI can have on fusing data towards enhancing smart city mapping accuracy. We further validate our method on real-world data from the Oslo region, complementing the synthetic evaluation with a real deployment setting, where our best fusion model reaches 64.9% macro IoU. We additionally outline a strategy for deploying the model over larger areas by tiling the region with overlapping windows.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Capturing Intransitive Dominance in Tennis Forecasting: A Graph Neural Network Approach

arXiv:2510.20454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. Our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.214 Brier score) forecasts competitively with established rating systems such as Weighted Elo. Although it does not improve on the baseline in unconditional accuracy, a forecast-encompassing test shows that it carries complementary information. A combined forecast significantly outperforms Weighted Elo, and there is some indication that the gain grows more strongly on the intransitive matchups our model targets. A graph-based representation of player interactions thus captures a forecasting signal that transitive rating systems discard, even between players who share no common opponents.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SciRisk-Bench: A Risk-Dimension-Aware Benchmark for AI4Science Safety

arXiv:2606.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in AI for Science (AI4Science) workflows, from scientific question answering and literature analysis to laboratory planning and autonomous discovery. This progress creates an urgent need for safety benchmarks that evaluate not only scientific competence, but also whether models recognize and avoid risks in high-stakes scientific contexts. Existing AI4Science safety datasets cover several disciplines and task formats, leaving the underlying risk dimensions underspecified. We introduce SciRisk-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI4Science safety from two complementary perspectives: explicit risk dimensions and scientific disciplines. SciRisk-Bench covers 7 disciplines, 31 subdisciplines and 10 risk dimensions. In the experimental section, we evaluate both mainstream LLMs and science-oriented LLMs across risk dimensions, disciplines, and sub-disciplines, enabling fine-grained diagnosis of where scientific models remain unsafe.

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

Decomposing one-class support vector machine into an ensemble of one-data support vector machines

arXiv:2606.16002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-class classification (OCC) is a classification problem in which the training data contains only one class. The one-class support vector machine (OCSVM) is one of the most competitive OCC algorithms. However, OCSVM has scalability issues with large-scale datasets. This paper proposes the acceleration strategy of OCSVM. The idea is to decompose the dataset into samples and train OCSVM models for single data points. Subsequently, ensemble learning is applied to combine all models to compute the OCSVM model for the dataset. In addition, further acceleration is achieved through a data-reduction strategy with an OCSVM model trained on the average of the training samples. The experiment compared the proposal and traditional OCSVM using the Python package. The proposed strategy is faster than traditional OCSVM, while achieving similar classification results. Moreover, the proposed strategy can create one-to-one correspondence between samples and models. Source code is uploaded at https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ODSVM

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

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

Contrastive-Difference CKA Reveals Concept-Specific Structural Alignment Across Language Model Architectures

作者:

Do different LLM architectures encode high-level concepts in structurally compatible ways? We systematically characterize a geometric-functional universality dissociation: across multiple concept domains and architectural families, moderate geometric convergence coexists with near-perfect functional transfer. Using contrastive-difference CKA (CKA_Delta), a training-free diagnostic that computes kernel alignment on per-sample contrastive differences, we isolate concept-specific convergence from generic similarity – achieving significant discrimination where standard CKA cannot. The dissociation replicates across all six concept domains we test (five with p =70B models. We position CKA_Delta as a practical regime classifier and architectural outlier detector (Gemma: d = 1.08, AUC = 0.79) rather than an absolute transfer-accuracy predictor, providing a training-free diagnostic for cross-architecture concept monitoring.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Squeezing Enhancement in Lossy Multi-Path Atom Interferometers

arXiv:2409.04091v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the sensitivity gains afforded by spin-squeezed states in atom interferometry, in particular using Bragg diffraction. We introduce a generalised input-output formalism that accurately describes realistic, non-unitary interferometers, including losses due to velocity selectivity and scattering into undesired momentum states. This formalism is applied to evaluate the performance of one-axis twisted spin-squeezed states in improving phase sensitivity. Our results show that by carefully optimising the parameters of the Bragg beam splitters and controlling the degree of squeezing, it is possible to improve the sensitivity of the interferometer by several dB with respect to the standard quantum limit despite realistic levels of losses in light pulse operations. However, the analysis also highlights the challenges associated with achieving these improvements in practice, most notably the impact of finite temperature on the benefits of entanglement. The results suggest ways of optimising interferometric setups to exploit quantum entanglement under realistic conditions, thereby contributing to advances in precision metrology with atom interferometers.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

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

RT-Counter: Real-Time Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided open-vocabulary object counting (TOOC) aims to count objects belonging to the categories specified by natural language descriptions. Although vision-language pre-trained models have been successful applied to TOOC tasks, they still struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and real-time inference requirements in counting scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a real-time TOOC framework, called the Real-Time Counter (RT-Counter), that achieves not only good counting accuracy but also high computational efficiency. RT-Counter designs a novel Visual Prototype Textualization (VPT) module that can project learned visual features into a text feature space and then generate features containing the abstract information that is hard to capture with visual prototypes and the detailed prototype information that is difficult to describe in text, enhancing the object-level visual-language model's counting capabilities. Additionally, RT-Counter incorporates our Weaving Transformer (Weaformer) layers, maintaining high descriptive power at a fraction of the computational cost. The Weaformer layer adopts a novel hybrid attention mechanism that can efficiently weave together local and global visual features. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that RT-Counter successfully breaks the accuracy-speed trade-off in TOOC. While achieving a competitive MAE of 13.30 on FSC147, RT-Counter operates at 112.48 FPS, making it 7.4x faster and over 4$\times$ more parameter-efficient than the existing leading methods in TOOC. Our work aims at balancing high accuracy and real-time performance in TOOC. Code is available at: https://github.com/Jason-Mar1/RT-Counter.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Independent Chiral Control in Theory-Space Models:A Rank-Preserving Framework and Its Application to Neutrino Mass Generation

arXiv:2409.09033v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a general framework of rank-preserving, element-wise matrix transformations for engineering fermion mass hierarchies in theory-space constructions. We prove that preservation of massless modes requires the transformation function to be separable, $g_f(i,j)=g^{(L)}_f(i)g^{(R)}_f(j)$, which in turn enables independent control of left- and right-chiral zero-mode profiles directly at the level of the theory-space mass matrix. This formalism unifies and extends the clockwork mechanism, permits controlled deformation of Kaluza–Klein spectra, and enhances hierarchy generation in GIM-like fine-cancellation scenarios. As a concrete application, we show that in theory-space models for neutrino masses, suitable transformations allow sub-eV light neutrinos to arise from TeV-scale new physics with only $\mathcal{O}(40)$ additional fermionic sites, while remaining consistent with charged-lepton flavor-violation bounds. In contrast, the corresponding untransformed models asymptote at the MeV scale and cannot access the phenomenologically required regime without extreme field multiplicities or hierarchical parameters.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Simulation to Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

Robotic strawberry harvesting requires precise 6D pose estimation; however, collecting 6D pose ground truth in real agricultural fields is inherently challenging. Existing 6D pose estimation methods have therefore relied solely on synthetic data that lacks scene-level realism, leaving their performance under real agricultural field conditions unquantified. In this work, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world 6D pose ground truth dataset of strawberries collected in actual agricultural fields (12,040 images). We also introduce a synthetic dataset rendered in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, featuring scene-level realism and domain randomization. Nevertheless, our experiments reveal that a significant sim-to-real gap persists, underscoring the necessity of real agricultural field data for reliable evaluation. We further quantify the sim-to-real gap through baseline 6D pose estimation results across backbone encoders, serving as a reference for future work. The real-world dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Sequence-Based Therapeutic Peptide Classification with Augmented Negative Sampling

Therapeutic peptides offer high target specificity, low toxicity, and the ability to modulate protein-protein interactions, yet experimental functional characterization remains costly and slow. Computational prediction of therapeutic function directly from sequence could accelerate peptide screening and enable generative design pipelines, but requires reliable discrimination between therapeutic and non-therapeutic peptides. Existing multi-label predictors cover few functions, rely on limited datasets, and exhibit high glspl{fpr}, limiting their practical utility. We present a lightweight CNN classifier trained on the most comprehensive therapeutic peptide database to date (54,655 peptides, 48 functional categories). A key contribution is a statistically motivated negative sampling strategy using Markov models to generate diverse synthetic decoys at multiple difficulty levels. When evaluated on this controlled decoy benchmark, the FRP is reduced from over 60% for previous models to 2.1% for our approach. Our fine-tuned five-model ensemble achieves 78.9% Micro F1 and 54.6% Macro F1 while requiring only amino acid sequences as inputs. Analysis using a sparse L1-constrained variant of our model shows that convolutional filters capture conserved functional motifs and statistically improbable non-therapeutic patterns, with downstream layers combining these signals, providing mechanistic evidence that the network learns biologically meaningful structure. In a generalization task on the TPpred-LE benchmark, our model achieves 55.3% Micro F1 and 38.6% Macro F1, comparable to TPpred-LE trained on its native dataset (57.9%/38.1%) while predicting four times more therapeutic functions with four times fewer parameters. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/terra-quantum-public/tq-therapep-ai.

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

ARMOR-MAD: Adaptive Routing for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Debate in Large Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) can improve large language model reasoning, but fixed debate pipelines often waste computation and can amplify correlated errors among similar agents. We propose ARMOR-MAD, a training-free heterogeneous MAD framework that treats debate as conditional computation. ARMOR-MAD combines three components: Pre-debate Agreement Routing (PAR) decides whether independently generated Round-0 answers require debate; Early Agreement Stopping Evaluator (EASE) stops debate after convergence; and Semantic Outlier Detection (SOD) down-weights abnormal final answers during aggregation. Across MATH Level 5, GSM8K, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, ARMOR-MAD consistently improves over fixed-round heterogeneous debate with the same model pool, reaching 65.5\%, 96.5\%, 90.0\%, and 81.5\% accuracy, respectively. The results suggest that genuine model heterogeneity and agreement-based control are both important for making MAD more accurate and efficient.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

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

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

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

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

VidCRAFT3: Camera, Object, and Lighting Control for Image-to-Video Generation

Controllable image-to-video (I2V) generation transforms a reference image into a coherent video guided by user-specified control signals. While precise control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting is essential for high-fidelity creation, existing methods often treat these factors independently. This overlooks the physical coupling among viewpoint, geometry, and illumination in dynamic scenes, leading to visual inconsistencies such as mismatched shadows and perspective drift under simultaneous changes. We present VidCRAFT3, a unified and flexible I2V framework that explicitly models cross-factor interactions among geometry, motion, and illumination, enabling both independent and joint control over camera motion, object motion, and lighting direction. Image2Cloud provides explicit 3D geometric priors for accurate camera motion control. ObjMotionNet encodes sparse object trajectories into multi-scale motion features to guide realistic object motion. A Spatial Triple-Attention Transformer integrates lighting direction through lighting cross-attention for consistent relighting. To address the scarcity of jointly annotated data, we construct the VideoLightingDirection (VLD) dataset with accurate per-frame lighting direction annotations, and introduce a three-stage progressive training strategy that enables robust learning without fully joint annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VidCRAFT3 achieves state-of-the-art performance in control precision and visual coherence across diverse scenarios.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Kernels are Spectral Tensor Networks

arXiv:2606.20402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum kernels admit Fourier representations whose frequencies are determined by the data-encoding gates of the underlying feature map. We show that entangling tensor kernels are matrix product operator factorizations of the corresponding Fourier coefficient tensors, thereby identifying quantum kernels as spectral tensor networks. By grouping gate-level frequency configurations that yield the same feature-wise frequency, we obtain a grouped Fourier form that induces a more compact spectral tensor network representation of the kernel. We further show that kernel target alignment serves as a bridge between the Fourier and tensor network views. On a grid that resolves the accessible Fourier modes, it becomes the Frobenius cosine similarity between Fourier coefficient tensors. Our numerical experiments show that layered quantum kernels admit accurate representations with small bond dimension, revealing a compressibility governed by correlations between Fourier modes. This compressibility provides a diagnostic of classical representability and of whether kernel evaluation is likely to remain classically tractable.

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

LESS Is More: Mutual-Stability Sampling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive decoding by iteratively refining masked sequences, enabling parallel token updates and bidirectional conditioning. Their practical efficiency, however, is limited by sampling procedures that execute a fixed number of reverse denoising steps selected before decoding, spending computation on already-stable positions and sometimes committing unstable ones too early. We present \textsc{LESS}, a training-free, model-agnostic adaptive sampler that treats token commitment as an online stopping problem. \textsc{LESS} implements mutual-stability sampling through a joint stability rule that makes a masked position eligible for unmasking only when its top-1 prediction has high confidence, its top-1 token persists across recent reverse steps, and its predictive distribution is stable under top-$K$ inter-step Jensen–Shannon divergence. We evaluate \textsc{LESS} on Dream-7B, LLaDA-8B, and LLaDA-1.5-8B, covering full-sequence diffusion and semi-autoregressive blockwise sampling regimes, across seven benchmarks spanning general knowledge, math, and code. \textsc{LESS} improves average accuracy over strong training-free adaptive samplers while using $72.1\%$ fewer reverse steps than fixed-budget decoding. Since each reverse step requires a Transformer forward pass, these step-count reductions translate into fewer forward evaluations, lower measured wall-clock latency, and lower estimated inference compute.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet underexplored phenomenon: reasoning uncertainty is highly localized-only a small subset of high-entropy tokens dominantly affects output correctness. Motivated by this, we propose Minimal Test-Time Intervention (MTI), a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. MTI includes: (i) Selective CFG intervention, applying classifier-free guidance only at uncertain positions; and (ii) Lightweight negative-prompt guidance, reusing the main model's KV cache to approximate unconditional decoding efficiently. MTI yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks-e.g., +9.28% average improvement on six benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1-7B and +11.25% on AIME2024 using Ling-mini-2.0-while remaining highly efficient.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Trajectory-Level Redirection Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies bring natural language into closed-loop robot control, enabling robots to execute manipulation tasks directly from text instructions. The same interface gives text a recurring role in control because the prompt is reused at every replanning step, and each prompt-conditioned action changes the future observations on which the policy acts. Existing VLA attacks study adversarial prompts that elicit targeted low-level actions or make such actions persist across changing images. We identify a stronger trajectory-level failure mode: a prompt that still $appears$ to specify the intended task but redirects the final physical outcome. We mathematically formalize this setting as $command-preserving trajectory redirection$, a prompt-only threat model in which the attacker chooses one prompt before the episode, all policy and environment components remain fixed, and the prompt must stay close to the benign instruction while omitting target words and correction language. To find such prompts, we introduce an on-policy prompt search method that uses rollouts to discover perturbations whose closed-loop behavior tracks a target task while satisfying the command-preserving constraints. Experiments in simulation and on hardware show that near-benign prompt perturbations can redirect VLA rollouts to attacker-specified targets. These results expose a trajectory-level vulnerability in VLA instruction grounding: text that appears to preserve the intended command can still give an adversary control over the robot's final physical outcome. Project website: https://vla-redirection-attack.github.io/