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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

An epidemiological scenario for Mass Events During the World Cup

Authors:
Velasco-Hernandez↗J. X↗

This brief work discusses potential superspreading events that may occur during the World Cup in Mexico. The study is particularly focused on the city of Guadalajara due to a large recent outbreak in January and February and insufficient vaccine coverage prior to 2026. Keywords: Superspreading; measles outbreak; branching process; individual reproduction number; World Cup

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03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Malaria Risk among Internally Mobile Individuals and Heterogeneous Mobility Patterns in Two Hypoendemic Communities: Implications for Malaria Elimination in the Peruvian Amazon.

Authors:
Ramirez Saavedra↗Acosta↗Rodriguez↗Cabrera-Sosa↗Escalente↗A. A↗Vinetz↗J. M↗Torres↗Gamboa↗

Background: Human mobility is increasingly recognized as a key factor influencing malaria transmission dynamics, particularly in low-transmission settings approaching elimination. This study aimed to assess mobility patterns and their association with malaria risk in two hypoendemic communities in the Peruvian Amazon. Method: A longitudinal study was conducted in the communities of Libertad and Urcomirano (Mazan River basin). Monthly population screenings were combined with weekly active and passive case detection. A total of 678 individuals were enrolled. Mobility patterns were assessed through structured questionnaires, and social network analysis was used to characterize travel connections. Log-binomial regression analysis was applied to identify risk factors associated with malaria infection. Result: Internally, mobile individuals in Libertad showed a higher malaria incidence (>32.47 cases per 1,000 person-months) than those in Urcomirano (

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Seokju Cho↗Ryo Hachiuma↗Abhishek Badki↗Hang Su↗Byung-Kwan Lee↗Chan Hee Song↗Sifei Liu↗Subhashree Radhakrishnan↗Seungryong Kim↗Yu-Chiang Frank Wang↗Min-Hung Chen↗

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

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

EAGG: Embodiment-Aligned Grasp Generation via Geometry-Aware Graph Conditioning

Authors:
Wanhao Niu↗Qiyan Ke↗Yuan Sun↗Hao Sun↗Jie Xu↗Muyuan Ma↗Ruiqi Hu↗Fuchun Sun↗

arXiv:2606.18092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-end-effector grasp generation seeks a unified model that generalizes across objects and across embodiments ranging from parallel grippers to dexterous end effectors. Existing grasp generators are typically designed for a fixed embodiment or encode embodiment identity with a static descriptor, which weakens transfer when topology, actuation coupling, and contact geometry differ substantially. We present EAGG, an embodiment-aligned grasp generator that represents each embodiment with a topology-aware end-effector graph and an embodiment-specific low-dimensional end-effector control space. A frozen end-effector-cognition backbone converts the current articulated state into geometry-aware tokens that act as a reusable morphology prior, and iterative geometry injection refreshes these tokens throughout sampling so that conditioning remains synchronized with the evolving end-effector geometry. On the MultiGripperGrasp benchmark, EAGG reaches 56.17% average success across six training end effectors, remaining within 1.10 percentage points of specialized training while preserving transfer to finetuning and zero-shot end effectors. Iterative geometry injection further reduces the pooled median contact distance from 0.239 cm to 0.189 cm. These results show that cross-end-effector grasp generation is strengthened by aligning embodiment structure inside a shared generator rather than suppressing embodiment differences. Code is available at https://github.com/wanhaoniu/EAGG.

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

LOKI: Memory-Free Null-Space Constrained Lifelong Knowledge Editing

Authors:
Masih Eskandar↗Miquel Sirera Perell\'o↗Stratis Ioannidis↗Jennifer Dy↗

arXiv:2606.19679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong knowledge editing aims to efficiently and sequentially update language models over time, as new knowledge becomes available or when the model makes mistakes, while preserving acceptable performance on past knowledge. One unresolved challenge is that existing methods modify a fixed set of layers for all new knowledge samples, reducing flexibility and increasing catastrophic forgetting. Another is requiring access to previous knowledge and extensive pre-processing to obtain data statistics. To address these challenges, we introduce LOKI, a novel approach that uses dynamic layer selection based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion and projects gradient updates onto the null-space of the model weights, bypassing the requirement for previous knowledge access. We show that LOKI achieves superior performance to existing approaches across a wide variety of experiments, achieving up to a 14\% improvement in average accuracy.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

Authors:
Yuntian Tang↗Bohan Jia↗Wenxuan Huang↗Lianyue Zhang↗Jiao Xie↗Wenxi Li↗Wei Li↗Jie Hu↗Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji↗Shaohui Lin↗

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

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

Early Anomaly-Onset Detection based on Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice Spectra: A Transmission-Grid Test Case

Authors:
Eduardo Jr Piedad↗Eduardo Prieto-Araujo↗Oriol Gomis-Bellmunt↗

arXiv:2606.15856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operational disturbance monitoring in power networks requires decisions to be made from waveform windows as they arrive, rather than from completed records after the event. This study evaluates full-vector Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice (WVDS) spectra for sequential anomaly-onset detection in high-voltage grid-voltage waveforms. The approach keeps the bilinear midpoint interaction structure of the Wigner–Ville distribution and represents each 128-sample voltage window by a 128-dimensional slice spectrum, avoiding manually selected fault-frequency markers. WVDS is used with a baseline-normalized deviation (BND) score and is compared against the BND of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT-BND), raw-window autoencoders, FFT autoencoders, and WVDS autoencoders under the same thresholding and three-window persistence rule. A synthetic autoencoder–clustering teacher is used to select RTE fault records that start from an initially normal region and then transition to anomalous behavior. On the filtered test set, FFT-BND achieves the highest sensitivity, whereas WVDS-BND provides the lowest false-alarm operating point, reducing record-level pre-onset false alarms to 0.69%. The autoencoder comparison follows the same selectivity pattern: WVDS reconstruction decreases false alarms relative to FFT reconstruction but misses more examples. The results indicate that preserved WVD cross-term information can form a selective representation for online grid-waveform anomaly monitoring when false alarms are costly.

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

CAPED: Context-Aware Privacy Exposure Defense for Mobile GUI Agents

Authors:
Siyu Shen↗Fenghao Xu↗Wenrui Diao↗Kehuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.12666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Screenshot-based mobile GUI agents can operate ordinary smartphone apps through the same visual interface as a human user, but this capability also turns every screen observation into a privacy boundary. During normal task execution, screenshots may expose contacts, messages, photos, files, recommendations, health cues, and other sensitive context that is unrelated to the user's request. We call this problem incidental visual privacy exposure. It is difficult to address with existing defenses: text anonymization misses many visual and inferential cues, while generic privacy masking can remove the evidence and controls that a GUI agent needs to complete the task. This paper presents CAPED, a context-aware pre-upload exposure control layer for mobile GUI agents. CAPED is designed as a phone-side protection layer: before screenshots are released to a remote multimodal agent, it extracts task requirements, uses screen context as a privacy prior, parses visible UI elements, and selectively exposes only content needed for the current task while masking incidental private content. We evaluate CAPED on AndroidWorld for broad task utility and with a controlled 28-task seeded privacy evaluation used as a measurement instrument for trajectory-level incidental leakage. In this seeded evaluation, Full CAPED reduces success-conditioned weighted seeded leakage from 0.766 under raw screenshots to 0.268 while preserving high task utility. A broader AndroidWorld run shows a remaining prototype-level utility cost, but the results support the central claim that screenshot upload should be treated as an explicit device–cloud boundary decision, governed by task-driven selective exposure rather than all-or-nothing screen sharing.

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

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Authors:
Yue Li↗Xin Yi↗Dongsheng Shi↗Yongyi Cui↗Gerard de Melo↗Linlin Wang↗

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

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

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Authors:
Dingrong Wang↗Xian Tao↗Zhen Qu↗Hengliang Luo↗Xinyi Gong↗Fei Shen↗Zhengtao Zhang↗Guiguang Ding↗

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

Authors:
Xingyu Dang↗Rohit Agarwal↗Rodrigo Porto↗Anirudh Goyal↗Liam H Fowl↗Sanjeev Arora↗

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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

Pix2Pix-Hybrid: Structure-Guided Conditional Synthesis of Hajj Crowd Images with Multi-Channel Conditioning and Weak Attribute Supervision

Authors:
Amirah F. Alshammari↗Bander A. Alzahrani↗Nahed A. Alowidi↗

Developing accurate crowd-counting models for Hajj pilgrimage scenes remains challenging because domain-specific annotated images are scarce and data collection during large gatherings raises privacy concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Pix2Pix-Hybrid (P2P-H), a hybrid conditional GAN for structure-guided Hajj crowd-image synthesis and data augmentation. P2P-H builds on Pix2Pix and employs a U-Net generator conditioned on eight input channels that jointly encode structural cues (edges and grayscale) and contextual attributes (crowd density and time of day). To capture detailed textures in dense scenes, the framework integrates two multi-scale PatchGAN discriminators operating at different resolutions. The training procedure combines adversarial, perceptual, and feature-matching objectives with adaptive data augmentation and stabilization strategies. The model was trained on 993 real Hajj frames collected from 60 publicly available video sources, with conditioning attributes derived automatically to reduce manual labeling effort. Using this framework, we constructed CrowdH, a synthetic dataset of 10,000 high-resolution Hajj crowd images. Experimental results show that P2P-H improves structure-preserving conditional synthesis quality compared with Pix2Pix and StyleGAN2-ADA baselines and shows favorable transfer to other crowd datasets. To assess downstream utility, we further constructed CrowdH-Mix-469, an annotated mixed real-synthetic dataset comprising 384 real Hajj images and 85 selected synthetic images,and evaluated five crowd-counting models under real-only and real-plus-synthetic training. The selected synthetic data reduced MAE across all five models, with the strongest gain observed for CSRNet.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

Authors:
Aditya Bhaskara↗Ashok Cutkosky↗Ravi Kumar↗Manish Purohit↗

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

QG-MIL: A Gated Transformer Aggregator for Domain-Agnostic Multiple Instance Learning in Medical Imaging

Authors:
Luca Zedda↗Davide Antonio Mura↗Cecilia Di Ruberto↗Maurizio Atzori↗Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen↗Carsten Marr↗Andrea Loddo↗

Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregators in medical imaging are prone to attention concentration, producing overconfident and unstable predictions. We introduce QG-MIL, a gated transformer aggregator that addresses this through four synergistic architectural components: RMSNorm-based pre-normalization, per-head QK normalization, fine-grained attention output gating, and SwiGLU-style feed-forward modules. Together, these design choices stabilize training and distribute attention more uniformly across instances without auxiliary losses, masking, or multi-stage regularization. We evaluate QG-MIL across six benchmarks spanning whole-slide pathology and cell-level hematology, covering two fundamentally different MIL scales. The best-performing QG-MIL variants outperform leading baselines on all six benchmarks, with an average improvement of +6.1 mean macro F1 points. Attention overlays and attention mass analysis confirm more distributed instance weighting. Ablation studies show that while individual components can match the full model on specific datasets, the QG-MIL design provides the most consistent cross-domain performance and tightest variance when compared to selected baselines. We release a configurable implementation to support reproducibility at: https://github.com/unica-visual-intelligence-lab/QG-MIL

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

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Authors:
Jian Xu↗Delu Zeng↗John Paisley↗Qibin Zhao↗

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

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

Knowing When to Quit: A Principled Framework for Dynamic Abstention in LLM Reasoning

Authors:
Hen Davidov↗Nachshon Cohen↗Oren Kalinsky↗Yaron Fairstein↗Guy Kushilevitz↗Ram Yazdi↗Patrick Rebeschini↗

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold outputs before or after generation, dynamic mid-generation abstention considers early termination of unpromising reasoning traces at each token position. Prior work has explored empirical variants of this idea, but principled guidance for the abstention rule remains lacking. We present a formal analysis of dynamic abstention for LLMs, modeling abstention as an explicit action within a regularized reinforcement learning framework. An abstention reward parameter controls the trade-off between compute and information. We show that abstaining when the value function falls below this reward strictly outperforms natural baselines under general conditions. We further derive a principled and efficient method to approximate the value function. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning and toxicity avoidance tasks support our theory and demonstrate improved selective accuracy over existing methods.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

Authors:
Georgios N. Tsigaridas↗Aristides I. Kechriniotis↗Christos A. Tsonos↗Konstantinos K. Delibasis↗

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

Authors:
Li↗Hwang↗Shockley↗Motsinger-Reif↗Hsieh↗J.-H↗Auerbach↗S. S↗Reif↗

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Residual-Space Evolutionary Optimization via Flow-based Generative Models

Authors:
Zhuo Cao↗Lena Krieger↗Fernanda Nader↗Xuan Zhao↗Hanno Scharr↗Ira Assent↗

arXiv:2606.20084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data editing with generative methods typically requires differentiable objectives and gradient-based search. However, these assumptions break down in flow-based settings, where edits are performed through forward and backward integration and often involve non-differentiable or black-box objectives. We introduce residual-space evolutionary optimization, a model-agnostic framework that addresses this gap by combining flow-based generative editing with evolutionary algorithms. Building on the observation that conditional flow matching (CFM) can disentangle condition-controlled factors from instance-specific residuals, our framework directly operates in residual space and separates two complementary search regimes: self-pollination performs local exploitation through feature-preserving residual refinement, and cross-pollination promotes broader exploration by recombining residuals across heterogeneous samples. As a proof of concept, we validate on MorphoMNIST, a benchmark dataset for counterfactual generation, and on crystal data, demonstrating that this exploration–exploitation decomposition provides a useful mechanism for balancing target alignment, instance preservation, and diversity, and extends beyond images to real-world scientific domains.

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

Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States

Authors:
Zakaria Dahbi↗Amelle Za\"ir↗

arXiv:2605.05167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolutely maximally entangled (AME) states are fundamental resources in quantum information theory, yet their construction and certification remain a nontrivial problem. Within the family of quadratic phase quantum states, defined by symmetric matrices $P$ over finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, we show that the Rank-Purity Duality $\operatorname{Tr}(\rho_S^2) = |\mathbb{F}|^{-\operatorname{rk}_{\mathbb{F}}(P_{S,\bar{S}})}$ follows from additive character orthogonality and holds over all $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$, yielding a polynomial-time AME certification criterion. For square-free dimensions $d = p_1\cdots p_r$, the Chinese Remainder Theorem induces a prime-field factorisation. This implies additivity of Rényi-2 entropy and yields sharp obstruction criteria that rule out cases such as $\operatorname{AME}(4,6)$ and constrain the open case $\operatorname{AME}(8,6)$. As a proof of concept, we construct an explicit $\operatorname{AME}(17,10001)$ state, certified across all $65{,}535$ bipartitions, demonstrating that the framework scales to large systems and previously inaccessible local dimensions.

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

Phase-Localized Curation Does Not Help: A Negative Result on Per-Phase Metric Selection for Demonstration Filtering

Authors:
Aarav Bedi↗

arXiv:2606.15064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation demonstrations have temporal phase structure, and a natural hypothesis is that demonstration-curation metrics should be applied within phases rather than globally. The idea is to segment each trajectory into phases, score each phase with the metric that is locally most informative, and then aggregate. This follows directly from prior work showing that a single global metric can be the best detector of a defect and yet the worst curator of the resulting policy. We test the per-phase hypothesis on three contact-rich LIBERO pick-and-place tasks with a controlled early-release structural defect, comparing phase-gated curation against the same metrics applied uniformly and against a strong single global metric. Across all three tasks and five random seeds per condition, phase-gated curation is never the best curation strategy, and it is the worst of the three on two of the three tasks (Task 1: 86.0 vs. 92.0 for global; Task 3: 22.7 vs. 48.0 for uniform). We trace the failure to a concrete mechanism. When the defect signal is concentrated in a single phase, rank-aggregating across phases dilutes that signal with uninformative scores from defect-free phases, selecting a worse demonstration subset than simply applying the defect-informative metric everywhere. We further show that the per-phase metric selection does not transfer across tasks, since no phase shares a winning metric between any two tasks, so the selection cannot be reused and must be re-derived per task from a noisy sweep. These results bound a plausible and previously untested method, and they argue that practitioners should prefer identifying a single defect-informative metric over decomposing curation by phase. We release the full pipeline, all metric implementations, and per-seed results.

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

Conformal Candidate Certification for Offline Model-Based Optimization

Authors:
Seungjin Choi↗

arXiv:2606.15217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline model-based optimization (MBO) proposes candidates by optimizing a surrogate trained on a fixed historical dataset. Because candidates are deliberately out-of-distribution, surrogate rankings are least reliable exactly where the optimizer is most aggressive, yet existing methods provide no per-candidate statistical certificate that a design meets a target threshold. We propose Conformal Candidate Certification (CCC), a post-hoc wrapper that attaches a calibrated one-sided lower bound to each candidate and advances only those whose bound exceeds the target. We show that entropy-regularized surrogate maximization induces a Gibbs-tilted proposal, so the same surrogate supplies importance weights for weighted conformal prediction without a separate density-ratio estimation step. In a controlled synthetic study, CCC certifies $16.7\%$ of an aggressive proposal pool with empirical coverage 0.990 at nominal 0.90, while standard conformal prediction ignoring the covariate shift collapses to 0.416 coverage.

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

Global Geometry Is Not Enough for Vision Representations

Authors:
Jiwan Chung↗Seon Joo Kim↗

A common assumption in representation learning is that globally well-distributed embeddings support robust and generalizable representations. This focus has shaped both training objectives and evaluation protocols, implicitly treating global geometry as a proxy for representational competence. While global geometry effectively encodes which elements are present, it is often insensitive to how they are composed. We investigate this limitation by testing the ability of geometric metrics to predict compositional binding across a diverse suite of vision encoders. We find that standard geometry-based statistics exhibit near-zero correlation with compositional binding. In contrast, functional sensitivity, as measured by the input–output Jacobian, reliably tracks this capability. We further provide an analytic account showing that this disparity arises from objective design, as existing losses explicitly constrain embedding geometry but leave the local input–output mapping unconstrained. These results suggest that global embedding geometry captures only a partial view of representational competence and establish functional sensitivity as a critical complementary axis for modeling composite structure.

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