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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:
Yihan Zhang↗

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Authors:
Liu↗Zhang↗Yan↗

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

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03.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Observation of quantum vortex core fractionalization and skyrmion formation in a superconductor | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Magnetic fields can penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantum vortices, which consist of a core singularity with circulating currents. London’s quantization implies that there is one core singularity per quantum of magnetic flux in single-component superconductors. Here, we report signatures of quantum vortex core fractionalization on the potassium-terminated surface of a multiband superconductor KFe 2 As 2 . The observed splitting of single integer-flux vortices into several fractional vortices results in a disparity between the numbers of flux quanta and vortex cores. These fractional vortices often arrange in chains, which calculations show are characterized by a ℂP 2 skyrmionic topological invariant; this constitutes a different type of topological defect: the chiral skyrmion. The disparate natures of integer and fractional vortices comprising skyrmions lead to distinct spectroscopic signatures.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Haoping Yu↗Yuanxi Li↗Jing Ma↗

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

Authors:
Xian Sun↗Wei Gao↗Yingshuo Wang↗Lingdong Kong↗Yanhang Li↗Zhichao Fan↗Zexin Zhuang↗Wenlong Dong↗Zhiyuan Zheng↗Hrishikesh Paranjape↗Abhishek Mandal↗Johnny R. Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input. In such settings, two responses can receive the same final-answer score while differing in whether the trace explicitly flags injected biasing content. Accuracy-only evaluation collapses these cases. We study this gap as a measurement blind spot for responsible evaluation and introduce a minimal trace-level diagnostic with two axes: susceptibility (whether the bias breaks a previously correct answer) and acknowledgment (whether the trace contains a rubric-defined surface reference to the injected content). Across thousands of biased GSM8K trials, GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4 have similar susceptibility rates ($1.3\%$ vs.\ $1.2\%$) but substantially different acknowledgment rates ($13.0\%$ vs.\ $75.0\%$) under the same rubric.

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

Knowing When to Ask: Self-Gated Clarification for Hierarchical Language Agents

Authors:
Aijing Gao↗Yiming Kang↗Mengdie Flora Wang↗Jae Oh Woo↗

arXiv:2606.11349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In hierarchical reasoning, failures often originate at intermediate decision points where the agent commits to a wrong branch without recognizing that it lacks critical information. Rather than treating clarification as an external uncertainty trigger, we propose ACTION-RATING, a formulation that places it inside the agent's action space on a shared ordinal scale with navigation, so that asking competes directly with acting at every decision point and help-seeking becomes observable at intermediate states. Two structurally distinct information-seeking modes emerge from the agent's own ratings: mandatory (no viable branch) and opportunistic (residual uncertainty despite a leading candidate). On Harmonized Tariff Schedule classification (30,000-node taxonomy, three benchmarks, 9~LLMs across 4 families), we observe a regime shift from mandatory to opportunistic clarification, with Information-Seeking Effectiveness (ISE), a local diagnostic defined as the fraction of help interactions followed by a correct next navigation step (not a final-task metric), rising from 50% to 74%. Three diagnostic contrasts fail to reproduce this structure. A separability test shows that the information-seeking pattern (mode split, ISE ranking) persists when answer quality is degraded (-18.8% accuracy), supporting an empirical separation between where an agent seeks help and the quality of the help it receives. Under the controlled answer channel, accuracy gains reach +16.2% at 10-digit; we read this as an upper bound on what better localization could unlock, not a deployment estimate.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal features of high-energy scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian states

Authors:
Yaoqi Yang↗Igor P. Ivanov↗

arXiv:2604.00575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vortex states of photons, electrons, and other particles are wave packets that carry intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) and exhibit other features unavailable for plane waves. Collisions of high-energy vortex states can become a promising tool for nuclear and particle physics, once experimental challenges are overcome. An extensive literature exists on scattering processes involving vortex states; however, most works rely on assumptions that will be challenging to achieve in experiment. In this work, we initiate a systematic re-analysis of vortex-state scattering processes using paraxial Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) wave packets colliding at a non-zero impact parameter $b$. Since the total final transverse momentum $P_\perp$ is no longer fixed, we focus on how the differential cross section depends on $P_\perp$. We emphasize that non-trivial $P_\perp$-dependent features can originate either from the shape of the LG wave packets or from the dynamics of the scattering process under interest. Here, we focus on the former source and explore in detail these universal kinematic features, while the study of process-specific modifications, along with the novel insights they may bring, is delegated to a future work. Interestingly, the non-zero impact parameter $b$ plays a key role in many $P_\perp$-dependent effects, making it a useful probe of vortex states, not a nuisance factor as often assumed.

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

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Authors:
Zewen Liu↗

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Long-range nonstabilizerness of topologically encoded states from mutual information

Authors:
David Aram Korbany↗Tyler D. Ellison↗David T. Stephen↗Lorenzo Piroli↗

arXiv:2605.22424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study long-range nonstabilizerness (LRN), namely the obstruction to remove nonstabilizerness with shallow-depth local quantum circuits. In one-dimensional settings, the mutual information between disconnected spatial regions has proven to be a powerful tool to diagnose LRN. In this work, we focus on encoded states of two-dimensional topologically-ordered systems, and explore the ability of the mutual information to serve as a diagnostic of LRN. Focusing on the concrete setting of lattice models defined on a torus, we show that information about LRN can be gained from the analysis of the mutual information between non-overlapping regions containing non-contractible loops, and of the change of such mutual information under modular real-space transformations. We exemplify this idea in the toric code and the non-abelian string-net model with doubled Fibonacci topological order. In the former case, we show that the mutual information provides a full classification, certifying LRN for all encoded non-stabilizer states. In the latter case, instead, our approach does not lead to a full classification, as it detects LRN for all states except from a finite subset with special transformation properties under the modular group. Finally, we discuss how our results on LRN constrain the logical gates that can be implemented fault-tolerantly on the torus.

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

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

Authors:
Maryam Gholami Shiri↗Ivana Krminac↗Marko Djukanovi\'c↗Sa\v{s}o D\v{z}eroski↗Eva Tuba↗Tome Eftimov↗

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects

Authors:
Kahee Lim↗Soyeon Kim↗Steven Euijong Whang↗

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their fair responses across demographics has become crucial. Despite many efforts, an ongoing challenge is hidden bias: LLMs appear fair under standard evaluations, but can produce biased responses outside those evaluation settings. In this paper, we identify framing – differences in how semantically equivalent prompts are expressed (e.g., "A is better than B" vs. "B is worse than A") – as an underexplored contributor to this gap. We first introduce the concept of "framing disparity" to quantify the impact of framing on fairness evaluation. By augmenting fairness evaluation benchmarks with alternative framings, we find that (1) fairness scores vary significantly with framing and (2) existing debiasing methods improve overall (i.e., frame-averaged) fairness, but often fail to reduce framing-induced disparities. To address this, we propose a framing-aware debiasing method that encourages LLMs to be more consistent across framings. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces overall bias and improves robustness against framing disparities, enabling LLMs to produce fairer and more consistent responses.

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

Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge Still Stands

Authors:
Michael Goodale↗Salvador Mascarenhas↗

The recent successes of neural networks producing human-like language have caused significant stir in cognitive science, with many researchers arguing that classical puzzles about human cognition and challenges to artificial intelligence are being solved by neural networks. A notable case is the argument from systematicity due to Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, argues that humans display systematic biconditional dependencies. For example, someone can understand the sentence "John saw Mary" just in case that they understand the sentence "Mary saw John." Symbolic systems explain this systematicity of language and thought, while neural networks offer no immediate explanation. Several recent articles argue that this challenge has now been met by neural networks. In particular, Brenden Lake and Marco Baroni argue that their meta-learning for compositionality protocol matches and perhaps explains human systematicity. We demonstrate that these conclusions are premature. Among other results, we found that their model struggles to learn rules that are even slightly out of distribution compared to their training data. Furthermore, the model behaves unsystematically even on many within-distribution problems. We conclude that Fodor and Pylyshyn's challenge to neural networks remains unmet.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Voice Behind the Words: Quantifying Intersectional Bias in SpeechLLMs

Authors:
Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish↗Christoph Minixhofer↗Maria Teleki↗James Caverlee↗Ond\v{r}ej Klejch↗Peter Bell↗Gustav Eje Henter↗\'Eva Sz\'ekely↗

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in responses. We present a large-scale intersectional evaluation of accent and gender bias in three SpeechLLMs using 2,880 controlled interactions across six English accents and two gender presentations, keeping linguistic content constant through voice cloning. Using pointwise LLM-judge ratings, pairwise comparisons, and Best-Worst Scaling with human validation, we detect recurring directional disparities. Eastern European-accented speech receives lower helpfulness scores, particularly for female-presenting voices. Responses remain polite but differ in helpfulness. While LLM judges capture the directional trend of these biases, human evaluators exhibit significantly higher sensitivity, showing stronger accent-level contrasts.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network Algorithm for Many-Body Trace Norms

Authors:
Seunghun Lee↗Eun-Gook Moon↗

arXiv:2606.11882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trace norms are fundamental to quantum information theory, yet in many-body systems their evaluation remains a major computational bottleneck, as it generally requires diagonalizing exponentially large operators. Here, we overcome this bottleneck by introducing a controlled tensor-network algorithm for estimating the trace norm of matrix product operators without full diagonalization. The key idea is to combine Zolotarev's rational approximation to the sign function with a variational formulation solved using a density-matrix-renormalization-group-like algorithm. The resulting approximation is systematically improvable, with its accuracy controlled by the rational approximation parameters and the spectral weight near zero. Beyond the reach of exact diagonalization, we demonstrate controlled trace-norm calculations for entanglement negativity, quantum fidelity and quantum Fisher information, achieving substantially improved accuracy over polynomial-based Lanczos approaches. Our results establish trace-norm-based quantities as practical tensor-network observables, opening a route toward tensor-network studies of quantum information in mixed states.

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

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Authors:
Karn Tiwari↗Varnith Chordia↗Prathosh A P↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

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

SMGFM: Spectral Multimodal Graph Pretraining for Multimodal-Attributed Graphs

Authors:
Zhengyu Wu↗Xu Wang↗Hongchao Qin↗Xunkai Li↗Guang Zeng↗Rong-Hua Li↗Guoren Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal-attributed graphs (MAGs) couple graph topology with node semantics from text, images, and other modalities. Traditional graph learning contextualizes node semantics by coupling topology with node features. However, this coupling design becomes troublesome in MAGs, where structure-induced and modality-intrinsic semantics may contribute differently to downstream tasks. Structure-induced semantics promote relational consistency through smooth topological variation, whereas modality-intrinsic semantics often encode local, fine-grained distinctions that should not be uniformly smoothed or aligned. Therefore, the key challenge is to identify semantic roles before cross-modal fusion. To this end, we leverage graph-frequency variation as a prior, where low-frequency components capture topology-consistent semantics and high-frequency components preserve modality-specific semantics. Based on this intuition, we propose SMGFM, a spectral multimodal graph pretraining framework that decomposes each modality-specific node signal into graph-frequency bands and assigns band-level semantic roles before cross-modal interaction. Concretely, SMGFM constructs frequency-resolved modality tokens with scalable Chebyshev filters, estimates their coupling reliability through topology-conditioned routing, and performs band-modality interaction before fusion. Its frequency-routed objectives align smooth consensus routes while preserving modality-specific routes, mitigating spatial-domain entanglement and uniform cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments conducted on the MAG datasets demonstrate that SMGFM achieves state-of-the-art performance across graph-level and modality-level tasks.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

Authors:
Yegon Kim↗Seungyoo Lee↗Chaeyun Jang↗Hyungi Lee↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

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

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

Authors:
Nathaniel L. Diamant↗Brian L. Trippe↗

arXiv:2606.19496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can produce individually plausible samples while deviating substantially from a target set in the distribution of key features. For example, a model pretrained on broad drug-like chemical space may generate molecules whose molecular features differ from those of a therapeutic class of interest, such as known antibiotics. Correcting such distributional miscalibration is challenging: direct finetuning on the target set can overfit and does not control which features are matched. To fill this gap, we introduce kernel Calibrating Generative Models (kCGM). kCGM minimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between generated and target feature distributions using an unbiased score-function estimator, with KL regularization to remain close to the pretrained model. On a target set of 174 antibiotics, direct finetuning sacrifices chemical validity for feature-distribution matching, whereas kCGM improves target feature matching while increasing validity. We further demonstrate kCGM in protein and DNA generation tasks, showing it can adapt autoregressive, continuous-space diffusion, and discrete diffusion models using only feature-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/smithhenryd/cgm.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

Authors:
Mohamed Boubakour↗Talia Szikman↗Cyril Elouard↗

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Reliability without Validity: A Systematic, Large-Scale Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge Models Across Agreement, Consistency, and Bias

Authors:
Justin D. Norman↗Michael U. Rivera↗D. Alex Hughes↗

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for language models, but judge validation in practice relies on exact-match agreement, a metric that does not correct for chance and systematically overstates discriminative ability. We present the largest systematic evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge to date: 21 judges from nine providers across MT-Bench, JudgeBench, and RewardBench, evaluated under three protocols (agreement, consistency, bias audit) over 118 runs and approximately 541,000 individual judgments. Four findings emerge, consistent across the full cohort, including the April 2026 frontier: kappa deflation between exact match and Cohen's kappa is universal (33–41 pp on MT-Bench), judge rankings shift by up to 14 positions across benchmarks, high test–retest reliability (>0.95) coexists with severe position bias (>0.10) in two production-deployed judges (instantiating a consistency–bias paradox), and verbosity bias is small (

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

High-Fidelity Two-Step Image Generation via Teacher-Aligned End-to-End Distillation

Authors:
Dongyang Liu↗Ruoyi Du↗David Liu↗Dengyang Jiang↗Liangchen Li↗Qilong Wu↗Zhen Li↗Steven C. H. Hoi↗Hongsheng Li↗Peng Gao↗

Few-step diffusion distillation has become increasingly mature for 4-8-step generation, yet pushing further to 2 steps remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Z-Image Turbo++, a high-quality 2-step image generation model distilled from the 8-step Z-Image Turbo teacher. Our method addresses the central bottlenecks of increased task difficulty and limited model capacity in 2-step generation through three simple but effective design choices tailored to this regime. First, we propose Distribution-Aligned Adversarial Learning, which uses teacher-generated images rather than external real images as real samples for GAN training, providing a more attainable and informative adversarial target. Second, we adopt Step-Decoupled Parameterization, assigning independent model parameters to the two denoising steps to better match their distinct capacity demands. Third, we perform End-to-End Training with Iterative Regularization, allowing the first step to receive gradients from final image quality while preserving a meaningful intermediate generation through an explicit step-1 loss. Together, these designs substantially narrow the quality gap between 2-step and 8-step generation in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, highlighting the potential of carefully tailored distillation strategies for improving the quality-efficiency trade-off in few-step generation.

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

Twisted (co)homology of non-orientable Weyl semimetals

Authors:
Thijs Douwes↗Marcus St{\aa}lhammar↗

arXiv:2511.22303v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quasi-particle excitations in Weyl semimetals, known as Weyl fermions, are usually forced to emerge in charge-conjugate pairs by the Nielsen–Ninomiya theorem. When the Brillouin zone is non-orientable, this constraint is replaced by a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation, as a result of the chirality becoming ill-defined on such manifolds; this results in configurations with seemingly non-zero total chirality. Here, we set out to explain this behaviour from a purely topological perspective, and provide a classification of non-orientable Weyl semimetal topology in terms of exact sequences of twisted (co)homology groups. This leads to several discoveries of direct physical importance: in particular, we recover the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation in a coordinate-independent way, allowing meaningful limits to be set on its physical interpretation. A detailed discussion is provided on a specific Klein bottle-like topology induced by a momentum-space glide symmetry, including a full review of the insulating and semimetallic invariants of the system and a classification of the surface states on the non-orientable boundary. Beyond this, we provide a complete survey of all possible non-orientable Brillouin zones and their associated invariants, and extend our formalism into the realm of non-Hermitian topological physics and inversion-symmetric Weyl semimetals. Our work exemplifies the vast potential of fundamental mathematical descriptions to not only aid the corresponding physical intuition, but also predict novel and hitherto overlooked phenomena of great relevance throughout the physics research forefront.

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

Graph Reduction in Multirelational Networks: A Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark

Authors:
Mateusz Stolarski↗Micha{\l} Czuba↗Piotr Bielak↗Piotr Br\'odka↗

arXiv:2606.12581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world networks are inherently incomplete, noisy, and dynamically evolving, making it difficult to capture all actors and their relationships. Their scale often renders direct analysis computationally demanding. While influence maximisation (IM) has been widely studied, the role of graph reduction as a preprocessing step, and its impact on IM accuracy, remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce the Spreading-Oriented Reduction Benchmark (SORB), an open-source, standardised framework for systematically evaluating IM models across diverse task settings. SORB provides an extensible pipeline operating on a representative collection of real-world networks, including single- and multilayer structures, and accounts for graph reduction directly into the evaluation process. This design shifts the focus from analysing IM algorithms in isolation to quantifying how graph reduction alters predictive performance. Using SORB, we study the effects of sparsification and coarsening across multiple IM scenarios. Our results show that the impact of reduction is strongly dependent on both the network type (single-layer vs. multirelational) and the downstream task ($Gain@k$ vs. $\mathrm{AUC}_{\mathrm{cutoff}}$): sparsification preserves seed set quality on single-layer networks, whereas flattened multilayer networks exhibit systematic ranking degradation regardless of reduction strategy. These findings highlight the importance of reduction-aware, multi-task evaluation when studying spreading processes in complex networks.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Conflict-Aware Retriever Editing for Knowledge Injection Attacks on LLM-Based RAG Systems

Authors:
Xinru Liu↗Xianglong Zhang↗Di Cai↗Zhumin Chen↗Pengfei Hu↗Xin Xin↗

arXiv:2606.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Injecting malicious knowledge into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems can manipulate retrieved evidence and mislead downstream generation, posing a serious security threat for AI applications. Existing RAG injection attacks mainly rely on manipulating external knowledge bases, such as crafting malicious corpus. However, the synthetic text crafted by such data-centric methods could be detectable, leading to the failure of attacks. Beyond corpus manipulation, open-source retrievers are increasingly exposing RAG systems to model-centric attacks. In this paper, we propose conflict-aware retriever editing, i.e., CAREATTACK, a model-centric retriever attack framework for malicious knowledge injection in RAG. Specifically, CAREATTACK consists two stages of conflict-aware retriever editing and attack-preserving anchor repair. Conflict-aware retriever editing adapts efficient closed-form parameter editing to the dense retrieval model, promoting malicious knowledge above benign competing passages and resolving potential parameter conflicts through graph-based conflict detection and parameter editing projection. Then, attack-preserving anchor repair performs lightweight calibration on the edited retriever to further eliminate the impact on non-target prompts while preserving the attack effectiveness for target prompts. We instantiate CAREATTACK on Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and BGE-M3, and conduct evaluation on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method substantially promote malicious passages into the retrieved knowledge of RAG systems and can perform attacks for batches of target prompts and passages, given the access of retrieval model parameters. Since most RAG systems are built upon open-source retrieval models, this work reveals a practical attack surface in RAG systems. Codes are public accessible at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CareAttack-3F1C.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

Authors:
David Bertram↗Anja Ophey↗Sinah R\"ottgen↗Konstantin Kufer↗Gereon R. Fink↗Elke Kalbe↗Clint Hansen↗Walter Maetzler↗Maximilian Kapsecker↗Lara M. Reimer↗Stephan Jonas↗Andreas T. Damgaard↗…

arXiv:2511.05221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $\alpha$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

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