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

Prediction of Runtime Parameters of Parallel Chemistry Applications via Active and Generative Learning

arXiv:2606.16226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we develop two main Machine Learning based approaches to predict the runtime parameters of highly scalable parallel chemistry computations.These approaches employ active and generative learning together with the empirically determined gradient boosted regression tree models chosen among a rich suite of machine learning models. When evaluated on Coupled-Cluster with Singles and Doubles computations, our models achieve a mean absolute error percentage (MAPE) as low as 0.023 and a coefficient of determination as high as 99.9%. Furthermore, when combined with active learning to mitigate the lack of large amounts of training data, our models score a MAPE about 0.2 with 20-25% of the original dataset.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Enhancing Quantum Machine Learning with Anyons

arXiv:2606.16090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power of quantum computing and quantum machine learning relies on harnessing uniquely quantum phenomena as computational resources. While superposition, coherence and entanglement have been central to this effort, the role of particle exchange statistics remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce a quantum kernel framework that unifies bosonic, fermionic, and anyonic (fractional) exchange statistics within a single learning paradigm. We study this family of kernels from three perspectives. At the representation level, Haar-averaged effective-dimension analysis shows that fractional exchange phases access feature-space directions inaccessible to the purely symmetric or antisymmetric limits. At the level of kernel geometry, the corresponding Gram matrices show greater separation from the distinguishable-particle baseline and reduced label-dependent model complexity. Finally, on learning benchmarks, anyonic kernels consistently outperform their bosonic and fermionic counterparts, with stronger target alignment and more favorable class geometry. Together, these findings show that exchange statistics reshape the structure and geometry of quantum feature space, leading to enhanced learning performance. Our work identifies particle exchange statistics as an overlooked computational ingredient for quantum machine learning and provides the first systematic comparison of quantum learning models across exchange phases.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

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

SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of $0.929$ and MMRV of $0.119$, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.

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

A Cross-Model VLM-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Mesh Quality (and Why Cheap Proxies Fall Short)

arXiv:2606.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-image-to-3D generators are improving quickly, but there is no agreed, human-free way to tell whether one generated mesh is better than another. Practitioners commonly rely on cheap automatic proxies (render-space CLIP similarity and mesh geometry-validity statistics), yet how well these track perceived quality is unestablished. We make two contributions. First, we propose and validate a reproducible VLM-judge evaluation protocol: a fixed 24-view headless render rig, two independent vision-language judge families, and a mandatory position-bias correction that queries both presentation orders and keeps only order-consistent verdicts. The two judge families agree substantially with each other (Cohen's kappa = 0.66), well above the chance-agreement floor. Second, using this protocol as the reference, we show the cheap proxies do not substitute for it. Geometry validity is only a weak signal on average (because, as we show, it is bimodal) and stays below our pre-registered target, while render-CLIP is at chance. A learned Bradley-Terry head collapses onto a single manifoldness statistic (giving render-CLIP a negative weight) and matches geometry-only exactly, so learning the feature weights buys nothing. The proxy is also bimodal: it is significantly above chance on contrasts with visible geometric defects but at chance on ambiguous contrasts, consistent with geometry validity tracking the judge only when the defect is visually salient. We therefore recommend the VLM-judge protocol as a reliable, reproducible evaluator under the conditions tested (two feed-forward generators on Google Scanned Objects, with a face-drop degradation regime) and advise against geometry/CLIP proxies as optimization targets.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Supersymmetry of dissipative Bose-Fermi systems with application to Jaynes-Cummings and Dicke models

arXiv:2606.12682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate how supersymmetries of Hamiltonians for coupled Bose-Fermi systems can be used to place the Hamiltonians of the Jaynes-Cummings model and Dicke model under the rotating wave approximation in matrix form and provide explicit analytic solutions for their eigenvalues. We then use this supersymmetry to place the Liouvillians of the associated Markovian open systems in matrix form and provide explicit solutions for their eigenvalues. These results are a consequence of the fact that the Hamiltonian of the Jaynes-Cummings model commutes with the linear Casimir invariant of the superalgebra $u(1|1)$ and that the Hamiltonian of the Dicke model commutes both with the linear invariant of $\sum_{i} u_{i}(1|1)$ and with the invariant of an additional $su(2)$ algebra. Our methods apply to various coupled Bose-Fermi systems with $u(1|1)$ and more generally with $u(n|m)$ dynamical superalgebras, and may provide efficient tools for studying more complicated examples.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

External Experience Serving in Production LLM Systems: A Deployment-Oriented Study of Quality-Cost Trade-offs

Production LLM systems accumulate reusable operational experience, but the practical deployment issue is not merely whether such experience can help. It is how different serving strategies trade off quality against online cost under realistic constraints. Injecting external experience can improve task quality, yet it also increases prompt burden, latency, and serving pressure. We study external experience serving as a deployment-oriented quality-cost trade-off problem. We evaluate this question in a real production moderation setting, with tool-use and GPQA as supporting contrast tasks that expose different output-cost regimes. We compare no-experience baselines, random experience controls, global prompt injection, and retrieval-based selective injection, and analyze both task quality and serving cost. The results show that, once experience becomes case-dependent, selective retrieval provides a stronger operating point than unconditional global injection. They further show that retrieval quality matters more than simply increasing Top-$K$, and that the same serving policy can exhibit substantially different cost-benefit profiles across short-output and decode-heavy regimes. These findings suggest that external experience is best treated as a selective, cost-aware serving decision rather than as a universal add-on. Overall, in the settings studied here, external experience pays off only when both the serving interface and the task-specific cost structure make its quality gains worth the online cost.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

StainFlow: Entity-Stain Tracking and Evidence Linking for Process Rewards in GUI Agents

arXiv:2606.07027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Re-evaluating Confidence Remasking in Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation. A notable limitation of the masked formulation, however, is that once a token has been unmasked it can no longer be revised, leaving dLLMs vulnerable to early sampling mistakes. To address this, a growing body of work has sought to extend masked dLLMs with self-correcting (remasking) capabilities. One appealing subset of these methods does so in a training-free, post-hoc manner based on token confidences, with encouraging early reported results. In this work, we revisit the empirical evaluation of a representative post-hoc remasking method, WINO [Hong et al., 2026], and find that under standard decoding settings (shorter block lengths) it brings little-to-no benefit over confidence-based unmasking alone [Wu et al., 2025]. Extending the evaluation to non-greedy decoding, we find that while confidence-based remasking can mitigate errors introduced by increased stochasticity to some extent, it also exacerbates the diversity collapse previously reported for confidence-based unmasking. Overall, our results show that the benefits of post-hoc confidence-based remasking are highly setting-dependent, underscoring the need for a more comprehensive evaluation framework.

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

teasr: training-efficient any-step diffusion transformer for real-world image super-resolution

Diffusion models excel in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) due to their powerful generative priors but suffer from slow iterative sampling. Although existing one-step distillation methods accelerate inference, they typically require auxiliary teacher models that inflate training memory and restrict scalability to large-scale architectures. Furthermore, these fixed-step models lack the flexibility to trade off speed for quality. In this paper, we propose TEASR, a training-efficient any-step diffusion framework for Real-ISR that enables both one-step and multi-step restoration within a unified model. Our key idea is to perform self-adversarial distillation within a single diffusion model, eliminating the need for auxiliary teachers or discriminators. Specifically, we propose a timestep-aware rectification strategy that stabilizes one-step generation across noise levels. These two designs further enables the distillation of 20B-parameter diffusion models on a single GPU, significantly improving training efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion transformer with decoupled timestep condition to separate the current noise state and the denoising target to enhance sampling quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TEASR supports seamless any-step sampling and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Instrument-based quantum resources: quantification, hierarchies and towards constructing resource theories

arXiv:2508.09134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum resources are certain features of the quantum world that provide advantages in certain information-theoretic, thermodynamic, or other useful operational tasks that are outside the realm of what classical theories can achieve. Quantum resource theories provide us with an elegant framework for studying these resources quantitatively and rigorously. While numerous state-based quantum resource theories have already been investigated, and to some extent, measurement-based resource theories have also been explored, instrument-based resource theories remain largely unexplored, with only a few notable exceptions. As quantum instruments are devices that provide both the classical outcomes of induced measurements and the post-measurement quantum states, they are quite important, especially for scenarios where multiple parties sequentially act on a quantum system. In this work, we study several instrument-based resource theories, namely (1) the resource theory of information preservability, (2) the resource theory of (strong) entanglement preservability, (3) the resource theory of (strong) incompatibility preservability, (4) the resource theory of traditional incompatibility, and (5) the resource theory of parallel incompatibility. Furthermore, we outline the hierarchies of these instrument-based resources and provide measures to quantify them. We then also established a relationship between our resource measure and the advantage in an information-theoretic task. In short, we provide a detailed framework for a wide variety of instrument-based quantum resource theories.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding

arXiv:2606.12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformer models, yet its extension to high-dimensional domains lacks a unified theoretical formulation. Most existing approaches either apply rotations independently along each axis or empirically mix frequencies, which limits cross-dimensional interactions and yields direction-dependent representations. To address these limitations, we propose nD-RoPE, a decomposition-free generalization of RoPE to arbitrary dimensions. From a translation-invariant formulation in continuous Hilbert space, we derive a spectral condition for isotropy that requires treating positions and frequencies as coupled \(n\)-dimensional vectors. We instantiate this formulation with a multi-scale regular-simplex wave-vector design, which provides non-degenerate spatial coverage and a symmetric, directionally balanced second-order response. Experiments across images, videos, and point clouds demonstrate consistent performance gains and improved generalization in high-dimensional settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Integrating Reasoning and Generalization in Text-to-SQL via Self-Enhanced Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.15598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this task, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle to strike a balance between strong reasoning capabilities and robust generalization. To address these limitations, we propose CoTE-SQL to enhance the LLM-based text-to-SQL generation with three key innovations: (i) self-enhanced reasoning traces distilled from LLMs without human annotation, (ii) structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with modular decomposition and examples retrieval, and (iii) error-aware revision based on SQL execution feedback. Extensive experiments on the Spider and Bird benchmarks demonstrate that CoTE-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance among methods built on open-source LLMs with comparable model sizes on Bird (53.39% EX / 59.02 VES) and strong results on Spider (79.60% EX / 77.19 VES), with especially significant gains on complex queries. Results highlight the effectiveness of combining self-enhancement, structured reasoning, and execution-time feedback within an LLM-based framework for text-to-SQL design.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DecompSR: A dataset for decomposed analyses of compositional multihop spatial reasoning

arXiv:2511.02627v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.

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

Inflationary branch decoherence and the cosmological arrow of time

作者:

arXiv:2602.21263v3 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze branch decoherence in inflationary quantum cosmology by computing reduced density matrices and branch-overlap factors for long-wavelength perturbations. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state is real in the semiclassical regime and contains both expanding and contracting WKB components, whereas the tunneling state is selected as an outgoing complex WKB branch; expanding-contracting decoherence is therefore central for the former and mainly diagnostic for the latter. Using the influence-functional formalism, we derive the noise kernel for a light spectator environment and evaluate decoherence under horizon-based and EFT-motivated coarse grainings. We then compute the single-mode branch overlap directly from the Bunch-Davies mode functions, obtaining $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|=[z^2/(z^2+1)]^{1/4}$ in the massless limit and $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|\sim z^\nu$ on superhorizon scales for massive fields, where $z=-k\eta$ is the dimensionless wavenumber with $\eta$ the conformal time. In the massless case, the accumulated geometric branch functional is evaluated in closed form, with a leading cutoff-sensitive phase-space term and a universal subleading contribution. The calculation provides an explicit quantitative bridge between quantum-cosmological boundary conditions, inflationary squeezing, and the emergence of effectively classical cosmological histories.

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

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Sinks in Diffusion Transformers: A Causal Analysis

Attention sinks – tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass – are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in text-to-image diffusion, dynamically identifying dominant attention recipients per timestep and suppressing them via paired, training-free interventions on the score and value paths. Across 553 GenEval prompts on Stable Diffusion~3 (with SDXL corroboration), removing these sinks does not degrade text-image alignment (CLIP-T) or preference proxies (ImageReward, HPS-v2) at $k{=}1$; only under stronger interventions ($k\!\geq\!10$) does HPS-v2 exhibit a metric-dependent boundary, while CLIP-T remains robust throughout. The perceptual shifts induced by suppression are nonetheless sink-specific – $\sim\!6\times$ larger than equal-budget random masking – revealing an empirical dissociation between trajectory-level perturbation and semantic alignment in diffusion transformers. \footnote{Code available at https://github.com/wfz666/ICML26-attention-sink.}

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

ArFake: A Robust Framework for Multi-Dialect Arabic Speech Spoofing Detection Benchmark

With the rise of generative text-to-speech models, distinguishing between real and synthetic speech has become challenging, especially for Arabic that have received limited research attention. Most spoof detection efforts have focused on English, leaving a significant gap for Arabic and its many dialects. In this work, we introduce the first multi-dialect Arabic spoofed speech dataset. To evaluate the difficulty of the synthesized audio from each model and determine which produces the most challenging samples, we aimed to guide the construction of our final dataset either by merging audios from multiple models or by selecting the best-performing model, we conducted an evaluation pipeline that included training classifiers using two approaches: modern embedding-based methods combined with classifier heads; classical machine learning algorithms applied to MFCC features; and the RawNet2 architecture. The pipeline further incorporated the calculation of Mean Opinion Score based on human ratings, as well as processing both original and synthesized datasets through an Automatic Speech Recognition model to measure the Word Error Rate. Our results demonstrate that FishSpeech outperforms other TTS models in Arabic voice cloning on the Casablanca corpus, producing more realistic and challenging synthetic speech samples. However, relying on a single TTS for dataset creation may limit generalizability.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

When Renormalisation Remembers: UV/IR Mixing as an Entanglement Bridge

作者:

arXiv:2606.17147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Renormalisation is traditionally understood to be a Wilsonian memoryless process in which ultraviolet (UV) degrees of freedom gradually decouple, leaving an autonomous infrared (IR) description. However this need not be the case: in UV/IR mixed theories correlations between widely separated scales can persist. In this work I recast UV/IR mixing as a Hilbert-space phenomenon, realised as correlations across renormalisation scales. This formulation is implemented using the Born-Reciprocal Tensor Network (BRTN), a new configuration of tensor network that is globally symmetric under phase-space reciprocity. On this network I prepare the vacuum and reproduce the expected radiative corrections. The resulting renormalisation geometry exhibits memory, with a bridge linking reciprocal representations of IR physics, whose cross-bridge entanglement provides a precise criterion for the viability of an effective description. I analyse when this criterion is met, and show that there is a large-volume limit, with the fundamental scale held fixed, in which the obstruction to a local description scales away: Wilsonian behaviour is restored and renormalisation forgets. The BRTN therefore provides a concrete and calculable platform for UV/IR mixing.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

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

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

arXiv:2606.16051v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

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

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Cancer care disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada: A sequential mixed-methods study

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted healthcare delivery worldwide, with cancer care among the most affected services. Prior studies documented delays in referrals, reduced specialist access, and increased provider burden. However, the extent to which these experiences were reflected at the system level remains unclear. Objective To document cancer care experiences and examine whether these experiences were reflected in population-level health system indicators across Ontario, Canada. Methods We used an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including patients with cancer (n=8), caregivers (n=5), healthcare providers (n=14), and decision-makers (n=5) across two hospital settings in Ontario, Canada. Emergent themes informed the development of quantitative indicators. We then conducted a retrospective population-based analysis of linked administrative health databases for cancer patients in Ontario (n=87,786) to assess the prevalence of identified themes. Results Four themes emerged: (I) delays in diagnosis and screening; (II) disrupted access to primary care; (III) barriers to specialist and mental health services; and (IV) fragmented care for patients with multimorbidity. Quantitative findings corroborated major themes. Screening rates declined for cervical (64.8% to 57.5%) and breast cancer (64.5% to 57.2%). While in-person primary care shifted almost entirely to virtual modalities (8.5% to 95.4%), overall visit volumes remained stable. Specialist care showed uneven patterns, with increased oncology visits but declines in cardiology and mental health services. Patients with multiple comorbidities experienced the largest reductions in non-oncology specialist care. Conclusion The pandemic disrupted key components of cancer care, particularly screening, access to certain specialist services, and care for patients with complex needs. Integrating qualitative and quantitative evidence highlights areas of system vulnerability and underscores the need for coordinated, resilient cancer care capable of maintaining essential services during future crises.