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

A deep learning framework for jointly solving transient Fokker-Planck equations with arbitrary parameters and initial distributions

arXiv:2604.06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE) is central to analyzing complex parameterized stochastic systems. However, current numerical methods lack parallel computation capabilities across varying conditions, severely limiting comprehensive parameter exploration and transient analysis. This paper introduces a deep learning-based pseudo-analytical probability solution (PAPS) that, via a single training process, simultaneously resolves transient FPE solutions for arbitrary multi-modal initial distributions, system parameters, and time points. The core idea is to unify initial, transient, and stationary distributions via Gaussian mixture distributions (GMDs) and develop a constraint-preserving autoencoder that bijectively maps constrained GMD parameters to unconstrained, low-dimensional latent representations. In this representation space, the panoramic transient dynamics across varying initial conditions and system parameters can be modeled by a single evolution network. Extensive experiments on paradigmatic systems demonstrate that the proposed PAPS maintains high accuracy while achieving inference speeds four orders of magnitude faster than GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulations. This efficiency leap enables previously intractable real-time parameter sweeps and systematic investigations of stochastic bifurcations. By decoupling representation learning from physics-informed transient dynamics, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for probabilistic modeling of multi-dimensional, parameterized stochastic systems.

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

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

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

Not All Retrievals are Useful: Cross-Attention for Input-Aware RAG in Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2603.14709v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances zero-shot time series (TS) forecasting by leveraging external knowledge bases, yet existing approaches overlook input-level relevance when fusing retrieved samples with the query. We argue that not all retrievals are equally useful, and irrelevant ones can degrade performance. To this end, we propose Cross-RAG, a zero-shot RAG-based forecasting framework that selectively attends to query-relevant retrieved samples via query–retrieval cross-attention. By modeling input-level relevance between the query and retrieved samples, Cross-RAG jointly incorporates three sources of information: 1) the query itself, 2) the retrieved samples, and 3) their relational interactions. In particular, this input-aware design enables Cross-RAG to remain stable as the number of retrieved samples $k$ grows, whereas prior methods without cross-attention require careful $k$ tuning to avoid degradation from irrelevant retrievals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cross-RAG consistently improves zero-shot forecasting performance across multiple TSFM backbones and various RAG methods, with additional analyses confirming its effectiveness across various retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/cross-rag/.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Hardware-Oriented Inference Complexity of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.

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

Beyond Independent Genes: Learning Module-Inductive Representations for Single-Cell Gene Perturbation Prediction

arXiv:2602.04901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics. In practice, perturbation responses are rarely gene-independent but instead manifest as coordinated, program-level transcriptional changes among functionally related genes. However, most existing methods do not explicitly model such coordination, due to gene-wise modeling paradigms and reliance on static biological priors that cannot capture dynamic program reorganization. To address these limitations, we propose scBIG, a module-inductive perturbation prediction framework that explicitly models coordinated gene programs. scBIG induces coherent gene programs from data via Gene-Relation Clustering, captures inter-program interactions through a Gene-Cluster-Aware Encoder, and preserves modular coordination using structure-aware alignment objectives. These structured representations are then modeled using conditional flow matching to enable flexible and generalizable perturbation prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple single-cell perturbation benchmarks show that scBIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on unseen and combinatorial perturbation settings, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% over the strongest baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ttruan2426-dot/scBIG.

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

ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection Enabled by Cooperative Robotic Agents

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A high-fidelity two-qubit gate for multimode superconducting P-mon qubits

arXiv:2606.24772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To scale superconducting quantum processors, it is essential to achieve long coherence times while engineering interactions that do not introduce additional decoherence channels. In superconducting qubit systems, this can be realized using multimode circuits that feature a protected qubit mode alongside a distinct mediator mode. Building on this concept, our recently developed P-mon qubit provides intrinsic protection against decoherence from the readout environment. We extend this approach to controlled two-qubit interactions, by exploiting the mediator modes of P-mons for on-demand coupling. Because direct interactions between the qubit modes are strongly suppressed, unwanted $ZZ$-type interactions are significantly reduced to below $3.6(5)~kHz$ in the idle state. When tuning the coupled mediator modes on resonance, the cross-Kerr interaction between the qubit and the hybridized mediator modes leads to a qubit-state dependent frequency shift. By selectively addressing these transitions, we implement a $180~ns$ long CZ gate and determine a fidelity of $99.62(4)~%$. These results represent a significant step toward a scalable superconducting architecture that maintains high performance at scale.

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

MoDiCoL: A Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning Dataset for Robust Speech Recognition

Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have made remarkable progress on standard benchmarks, yet performance gaps have emerged under real-world distribution shifts, caused by recording conditions, accents, speech impairments, and noise. Existing datasets and benchmarks typically isolate these factors, which overlooks their co-occurrence in real-world applications. In this paper, we argue that model robustness can be treated as a dynamic capability that continually develops, and we introduce MoDiCoL, a Modular Diagnostic Continual Learning dataset designed for controlled analysis of linguistic content, speaker characteristics, and acoustic environments. Furthermore, we propose a real-world-inspired continual learning curriculum to simulate incremental updates and study how robustness is acquired, transferred, and forgotten. We evaluate three continual learning strategies and provide detailed insights into robustness under evolving conditions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Muon$^p$: Muon with Fractional Spectral Powers

arXiv:2606.13867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an increasingly widely used optimizer that replaces a gradient $G=USV^\top$ with its polar factor $UV^\top$, thereby flattening the singular spectrum. However, full flattening discards singular-value information that may matter for adaptation. We introduce Muon$^p$, a Muon-style optimizer that instead uses fractional spectral-power updates $US^pV^\top$ for rational $p\in(0,1)$, interpolating between Muon and gradient descent. To make it practical, we prove that fractional spectral powers cannot be computed by any fixed univariate polynomial iteration, and furthermore derive low-degree odd bivariate recurrences that approximate $US^pV^\top$ using only matrix multiplications, preserving Muon's matrix-multiplication-only structure and compute complexity. We show that Muon$^p$ maximizes the linear improvement in loss under the Schatten $q$-norm for $q=1+\frac{1}{p}$. Empirically, Muon$^p$ is especially effective for finetuning: on billion-scale models, Muon$^p$ improves validation perplexity and downstream task performance. We further analyze when Muon$^p$ is less suitable, through the lens of spectral geometry. Our results reveal important insights on when preserving the singular spectrum can bring significant gains, and introduce a principled way to achieve them.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Influence-solvability: a systematic theory of $(1+1)D$ solvability and its application to brickwork circuits

arXiv:2606.12538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: `Solvable' circuits, such as dual unitaries and its generalisations, have arisen as paradigmatic examples of tractable chaotic non-equilibrium dynamics, both in classical and quantum systems. However, while increasingly more complicated sufficient conditions have been proposed, a systematic theory classifying and understanding general features of solvable circuits is missing. We develop such a theory by introducing influence-solvable circuits, a class of $(1+1)D$ circuits whose influence matrix, which represents the `bath' generated by its own evolution, is given by a uniform MPS with finite bond-dimension $\chi$. This property allows for efficient computation of subsystem dynamics and essentially contains all known examples of solvable circuits. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient local conditions by using a version of the fundamental theorem of MPS for open boundary conditions. Next we apply our theory to brickwork circuits with $\chi=1$ influence-solvability and perform a systematic classification of classical brickwork circuits with local dimension up to $d=3$ and quantum brickwork circuits with $d=2$. Our search reveals new solvable circuits that are not captured by known solvability conditions.

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

STAR: SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward Allocation for Text-to-Image RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.17979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing RL post-training methods for text-to-image generation usually convert the final-image reward into a single scalar advantage and apply it with the same strength to the entire generative trajectory. However, text-to-image generation naturally has temporal and spatial structure: different denoising steps are responsible for different generation stages, and the content that truly determines text alignment often appears only in part of the image. This granularity mismatch makes it difficult for policy updates to focus on the generative components that actually affect the reward. To address this issue, we propose SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward (STAR) Allocation for RL post-training of text-to-image diffusion and flow models. STAR uses text-image attention inside the generative model and starts from the core content that the user truly cares about in the prompt. It constructs spatial allocation maps that dynamically vary across denoising steps and rollouts, and allocates the same group-relative advantage to more relevant latent regions with almost no additional computational overhead. STAR then applies stronger policy updates to these regions through a spatially resolved policy objective. We use Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium as the base model and evaluate on three tasks: GenEval, OCR text rendering, and PickScore. Experimental results show that STAR improves compositional semantic alignment, text rendering, and preference optimization without changing the external reward source, achieving $\mathbf{0.9759}$, $\mathbf{0.9757}$, and $\mathbf{23.60}$ on GenEval, OCR, and PickScore, respectively.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

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

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

17.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

Why large-scale randomized trials of live-attenuated shingles vaccination for dementia prevention are urgently needed

In my view, we have never had as robust a body of evidence from observational data on an intervention for dementia as we do for live-attenuated shingles vaccination. Both a recent US National Institutes of Health expert workshop and an international expert consensus on Alzheimer’s disease drug repurposing identified large-scale randomized trials of shingles vaccination for dementia prevention as the crucial next step for the field.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learner-based Concept Drift Detection: Analysis and Evaluation

arXiv:2606.20216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning algorithms deployed for evolving streaming environments must handle the non-stationary data distributions, commonly referred to as concept drift. The presence of concept drift poses a major challenge for many real-world applications because it can severely degrade their predictive performance, hindering their ability to support robust decision-making. Consequently, the timely and efficient detection of drift events is critical for sustaining high accuracy over time. This study examines theoretically the concept drift characteristics and numerous drift detection algorithms across several categories. Furthermore, we evaluate their performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets exhibiting diverse streaming scenarios and drift characteristics, such as abrupt and gradual changes. This study aims to enhance understanding of the complex notion of concept drift characteristics and behavior of drift detectors, along with their applicability to diverse contexts.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.

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

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

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

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

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

Optimal Toffoli-Depth Multi-Controlled Toffoli Decomposition in 2D Qubit Layout

arXiv:2606.15113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multi-controlled Toffoli (MCT) gate is a key primitive in quantum arithmetic, oracle construction, and quantum cryptanalysis. Although recent work has established optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions under all-to-all qubit connectivity, their realization on near-term quantum hardware with restricted qubit connectivity remains largely unexplored. While general-purpose quantum mappers can route arbitrary circuits, they do not explicitly exploit the repeated interaction patterns inherent in MCT decompositions. In our present paper, we study architecture-aware mappings of optimal Toffoli-depth MCT decompositions onto restricted two-dimensional qubit layouts. We begin with a structured geometric placements that preserve the parallelism of state-of-the-art Toffoli and MCT decompositions with no additional depth overhead. We further introduce a motif-based packing framework in which decomposition layers are represented by interaction motifs derived from basic Toffoli gates. By embedding these motifs vertex-disjointly into hardware graphs, we characterize the minimum-size topologies supporting the required qubit resources and derive explicit bounds on the resulting depth overhead under tight qubit budgets. Finally, we compare these bounds with routing-aware placement heuristics and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of embedding different motifs across a range of hardware topologies.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing

arXiv:2606.19984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses trainable reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next-generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, enabling efficient and high-fidelity dynamical system forecasting.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

Authors: Unknown Author

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.