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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Sparse Configuration Interaction for the Electronic Schrödinger Equation Revisited: Complete Basis Set Limit Complexity and Quantum-Encoding Impact

arXiv:2606.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article we revisit regularity results for eigenfunctions in the discrete spectrum of the electronic Schrödinger equation and study their consequences for approximation complexity. In particular, for the convergence to the complete basis set limit, it can be shown that the curse of dimensionality in the leading algebraic exponent can be mitigated. That is, for general sparse grid constructions, the main term of the convergence rate with respect to the number of degrees of freedom is independent of the number of electrons. These insights indicate potential benefits for classical numerical solvers of the electronic Schrödinger equation and also for quantum-computing approaches through new qubit-efficient wavefunction encodings.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum ergodicity and semiclassical measures: mathematical results

arXiv:2606.12098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this chapter we review some results describing the high-frequency eigenmodes of the Laplacian on compact manifolds, or Euclidean domains, for which the geodesic flow is chaotic. We focus on the macroscopic distribution of these eigenmodes, which is described by the concept of semiclassical measure. The main result on the question is the Quantum Ergodicity theorem, originally due to Schnirelman. We provide the detailed proof of this theorem, including the adjustments necessary to treat the case of manifolds with boundary. We also discuss the Quantum Unique Ergodicity conjecture, and some progress towards this conjecture for strongly chaotic (Anosov) systems. In particular, we describe the constraints on admissible semiclassical measures, in terms of their Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, as well as more recent delocalization results.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

National trends and operational drivers of vaccine wastage in Uganda, 2020-2025: a descriptive analysis of four tracer antigens

Background Vaccine wastage reduces immunisation efficiency, increases costs, and complicates supply forecasting. Uganda routinely monitors vaccine use, but national evidence comparing observed wastage with World Health Organization (WHO) and Uganda-specific planning thresholds has been limited. We described national and sub-national trends for four tracer antigens to inform supply-chain planning and forecasting. Methods We conducted a retrospective descriptive analysis of routinely reported immunisation data from Ugandas District Health Information Software 2, 2020-2025. We analysed Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), measles-rubella (MR), oral polio vaccine (OPV), and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccine (DPT). Vaccine wastage was calculated as the proportion of issued doses not administered. Annual wastage rates were summarised using medians, and temporal trends were assessed using the Mann-Kendall test. Observed wastage was compared with WHO thresholds: BCG[≤]50%, MR[≤]25%, OPV[≤]10%, DPT[≤]15%, and Ugandas planning thresholds: BCG[≤]70%, MR[≤]40%, OPV[≤]15%, DPT[≤]10%. Effective Vaccine Management reports were reviewed to summarise reported reasons for wastage. Results During 2020-2025, median national wastage was 40.6% for BCG, 25.9% for MR, 10.0% for OPV, and 9.2% for DPT. OPV wastage declined from 12.8% in 2020 to 8.0% in 2025, with a significant downward trend ({tau}b=-1.00; p=0.008). OPV and DPT wastage remained largely within their respective Uganda in-country thresholds ([≤]15% and [≤]10%) for most of the study period, while BCG generally remained below the WHO threshold ([≤]50%) and MR frequently exceeded the WHO threshold ([≤]25%) but remained within Uganda's planning threshold ([≤]40%) in most years. The proportion of districts exceeding both WHO and Uganda thresholds declined for OPV from 36.3% to 5.5% (p=0.024) and for DPT from 22.6% to 1.4% (p=0.013). Wastage was consistently higher in lower-level (Health Centre II and III) facilities, compared to hospitals. Among 50 service delivery points, reported reasons included low session attendance (66%), multi-dose vial policy non-compliance (28%), and vaccine expiry (12%). Conclusion Uganda achieved reductions in OPV wastage and district-level improvements in DPT wastage, while BCG and MR remained more variable and frequently had higher wastage. Strengthening adherence to the multi-dose vial policy and improving session planning at lower-level facilities could strengthen vaccine utilisation and forecasting.

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

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

FactoryLLM: A Safe and Open-Source AI Playground for Evaluating LLMs in Smart Factories

arXiv:2606.14119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault diagnostics and recovery in smart factories is challenging because critical information is dispersed across manuals of multiple machines which are interconnected through the manufacturing process. Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide a promising approach. In this paper, we propose FactoryLLM, a safe and open-source AI playground designed for evaluating different LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models by analysing documents from multiple machines across the manufacturing process. FactoryLLM enables the user to configure the LLM, and assess performance when reasoning over multiple documents, through a dual evaluation setup using both RAGAS and NVIDIA's LLM-as-a-Judge metrics. FactoryLLM is safe because it allows users to run local or open-source LLMs without sharing sensitive industrial data, providing a controlled environment for experimentation. We demonstrate the efficacy of FactoryLLM through a case study which involves an Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle and its Mobile Planner software, evaluating three LLMs across 30 maintenance queries derived from approximately 600 pages of cross-machine documentation. The results suggest that FactoryLLM is effective in cross-machine document reasoning: every model achieved a groundedness score above 0.88. The full code and documentation for community to test FactoryLLM with their manufacturing specific scenarios are publicly available.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Data-driven subsampling rates for diffusion parameter estimation of SDEs

arXiv:2606.13615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of diffusion parameter estimation for stochastic differential equation (SDE) models in scenarios where data and model are compatible only on specific scales that have yet to be determined. We introduce a simple and efficient method for selecting suitable rates at which given time series data should be subsampled in order to ensure that the statistical structure of the subsampled data is consistent with the behavior of the SDE model on an infinitesimal scale. Our approach is based on analyzing the statistics of the lengths of monotonically increasing or decreasing segments in the subsampled data sequence, which we refer to as monotone runs. As an analytical foundation, we prove for a large class of SDEs with additive noise that the lengths of monotone runs at an infinitesimal scale are approximately geometrically distributed with success probability $1/2$. This universal characterization is employed to derive an automated method for selecting appropriate subsampling rates for given time series data that is directly applicable in real-world scenarios and does not rely on an asymptotic framework of multiscale diffusions. The approach is demonstrated using an application from industrial mathematics concerning surrogate models for fiber lay-down curves in production processes of nonwoven textiles.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Ergodic Properties of Non-Linear Density-Dependent Perturbations of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process

arXiv:2606.18877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The present paper considers McKean-Vlasov SDEs with density-dependent spatially unbounded drift, which may be viewed as a non-linear density-dependent perturbation of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. We develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for this class of equations. First, we establish strong well-posedness and derive optimal Gaussian pointwise bounds for both the solution density and its gradient. Then we derive an explicit expression for the stationary density and show that it satisfies logarithmic Sobolev and Poincaré inequalities. Finally, we prove exponential convergence to equilibrium in the \(\chi^2\)-metric.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

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

Beware of Aliases – Signal Preservation is Crucial for Robust Image Restoration

Image restoration networks are usually comprised of an encoder and a decoder, responsible for aggregating image content from noisy, distorted data and to restore clean, undistorted images, respectively. Data aggregation as well as high-resolution image generation both usually come at the risk of involving aliases, i.e.~standard architectures put their ability to reconstruct the model input in jeopardy to reach high PSNR values on validation data. The price to be paid is low model robustness. In this work, we show that simply providing alias-free paths in state-of-the-art reconstruction transformers supports improved model robustness at low costs on the restoration performance. We do so by proposing BOA-Restormer, a transformer-based image restoration model that executes downsampling and upsampling operations partly in the frequency domain to ensure alias-free paths along the entire model while potentially preserving all relevant high-frequency information.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Long-read sequencing enables high-accuracy mitochondrial heteroplasmy detection in Parkinson's disease

Background: Low-frequency heteroplasmic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variants are associated with aging and neurological diseases, including Parkinson's disease (PD). Targeted deep mtDNA sequencing using PacBio HiFi long reads has the potential to resolve heteroplasmy across the full mitochondrial genome with high accuracy. Methods: To validate Vega PacBio sequencing for detecting mtDNA heteroplasmy, we analyzed four predefined mixtures of two mtDNA haplotypes. We generated a single long-range PCR amplicon covering the entire mitochondrial genome. These amplicons were mixed at predefined ratios (minor mixture haplotype component: 5%, 2%, 1%, and 0.1%). Variant calling was performed using Mutserve2, and accuracy was assessed by calculating the F1 score from comparisons between expected and detected variants. Full-length mtDNA PacBio sequencing was applied to investigate heteroplasmy across fibroblast passages derived from five LRRK2 p.Gly2019Ser variant carriers (n=3 affected with PD and n=2 unaffected carriers). Changes in mtDNA heteroplasmy level and variant load were assessed longitudinally using a linear mixed model. Results: The single-amplicon approach enabled full-length haplotype resolution without amplification bias associated with overlapping PCR strategies. The F1 score of the predefined mixtures was 1.0 for heteroplasmy levels between 5% and 1% and remained high (0.91) at 0.1%. We detected n=10/62 variants discordant with the Illumina reference at the 0.1% mixture, but sensitivity remained very high at 1.00 in that mixture. Detected minor variants closely matched expected heteroplasmy levels, with average variant levels of 0.057 (5%), 0.022 (2%), 0.011 (1%), and 0.001 (0.1%). Across twelve fibroblast passages, we observed fewer mtDNA heteroplasmic variants ({beta}=-3.2, p=0.026). Increased heteroplasmic variant load over time was also associated with older age ({beta}=1.50, p=0.001) and PD affection status ({beta}=5.0, p=1.0 x 10-4) in LRRK2 variant carriers. Notably, we observed distinct patterns of heteroplasmic variants that either increased or decreased in heteroplasmy level across passages. Conclusion: PacBio HiFi sequencing, combined with a single-amplicon strategy, enables accurate full-length mtDNA heteroplasmy detection and longitudinal analysis, providing a valuable tool for studying mitochondrial variation and dynamics in disease.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Sorting Algorithms to Scalable Kernels: Bayesian Optimization in High-Dimensional Permutation Spaces

arXiv:2507.13263v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for black-box optimization, but its application to high-dimensional permutation spaces is severely limited by the challenge of defining scalable representations. The current state-of-the-art BO approach for permutation spaces relies on an exhaustive $\Omega(n^2)$ pairwise comparison, inducing a dense representation that is impractical for large-scale permutations. To break this barrier, we introduce a novel framework for generating efficient permutation representations via kernel functions derived from sorting algorithms. Within this framework, the Mallows kernel can be viewed as a special instance derived from enumeration sort. Further, we introduce the Merge Kernel , which leverages the divide-and-conquer structure of merge sort to produce a compact, $\Theta(n\log n)$ to achieve the lowest possible complexity with no information loss and effectively capture permutation structure. Our central thesis is that the Merge Kernel performs competitively with the Mallows kernel in low-dimensional settings, but significantly outperforms it in both optimization performance and computational efficiency as the dimension $n$ grows. Extensive evaluations on various permutation optimization benchmarks confirm our hypothesis, demonstrating that the Merge Kernel provides a scalable and more effective solution for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensional permutation spaces, thereby unlocking the potential for tackling previously intractable problems such as large-scale feature ordering and combinatorial neural architecture search.

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

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

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

CP4SBI: Local Conformal Calibration of Credible Sets in Simulation-Based Inference

arXiv:2508.17077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current experimental scientists have been increasingly relying on simulation-based inference (SBI) to invert complex non-linear models with intractable likelihoods. However, posterior approximations obtained with SBI are often miscalibrated, causing credible regions to undercover true parameters. We develop $\texttt{CP4SBI}$, a model-agnostic conformal calibration framework that constructs credible sets with local Bayesian coverage. Our two proposed variants, namely local calibration via regression trees and CDF-based calibration, enable finite-sample local coverage guarantees for any scoring function, including HPD, symmetric, and quantile-based regions. Experiments on widely used SBI benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of uncertainty quantification for neural posterior estimators using both normalizing flows and score-diffusion modeling.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inverted Dirac oscillator

arXiv:2606.15303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dirac oscillator is obtained from the Dirac Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{D}} = \left( c\vec{\alpha}\cdot \vec{p} + mc^{2}\beta \right)$ by modifying the momentum through a non-Hermitian substitution $\overrightarrow{p} \rightarrow \overrightarrow{p} \pm i\omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$. Despite the non-Hermitian nature of this momentum operator, the full Hamiltonian remains Hermitian due to the presence of the Dirac matrix $\vec{\alpha}$. However, if one instead introduces a Hermitian modification of the form $\vec{p} \rightarrow \vec{p} \pm \omega \beta \overrightarrow{q}$, the resulting Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian. In this case, the system corresponds to an inverted Dirac oscillator $H^{\mathrm{r}}$, where the potential becomes unbounded from below, the energy spectrum becomes continuous, and the eigenfunctions fail to be square-integrable, leading to normalization difficulties. We show that the Hamiltonian $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ is a pseudo-$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric operator, and we introduce an unbounded, non-unitary transformation that establishes a connection between $H^{\mathrm{r}}$ and $H^{\mathrm{D}}$. The purpose of this work is to analyze this relativistic quantum system – known as the Dirac inverted oscillator – which, despite its various applications, admits an exact analytical solution

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

GENEB: Why Genomic Models Are Hard to Compare

Progress in genomic foundation models is difficult to assess due to fragmented benchmarks, incompatible evaluation protocols, and task-specific reporting. As a result, claims of superiority or generality across models are often not directly comparable. We introduce GENEB, a large-scale diagnostic benchmark that evaluates frozen representations from 40 genomic foundation models across 100 tasks spanning 13 functional categories under a unified probing-based protocol, including few-shot regimes. GENEB enables controlled comparison across model scale, architecture, tokenization, and pretraining data while explicitly exposing task-level trade-offs. Our analysis shows that aggregate leaderboards are unstable: model rankings vary sharply across task categories, scale provides only modest and inconsistent gains, and architectural and pretraining alignment frequently outweigh parameter count. These results highlight limitations of current evaluation practices and position GENEB as a reference framework for principled comparison and category-aware model selection in genomic machine learning.

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

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Policy-aware Vector Search: A Vision for Fine Grained Access Control in Vector Databases

arXiv:2606.19803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vector databases are increasingly used in security sensitive contexts with Retrieval Augmented Generation and organizational AI pipelines; however, their security capabilities remain limited. Specifically, Fine-grained Access Control (FGAC) which is required to ensure that data access adheres to user-specific policies is not fully supported in modern vector databases. Unlike relational databases, vector databases combine structured and unstructured attributes to provide semantic, approximate query results, which complicates FGAC implementation. This creates an inherent tension between enforcing FGAC policies correctly, achieving high ANN search recall and maintaining low query latency. In this paper, we present a vision for Policy-aware Vector Search by formalizing the FGAC policy model in vector databases as well as the enforcement problem. We compare various enforcement strategies, present preliminary findings, and identify key open challenges for future research in policy-aware vector search.