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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

arXiv:2606.13703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. We trace the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The puzzle inspired a numerous variations such as involving numbers or coloured hats. We also present a novel hats puzzle involving self-reference.

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

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two central issues. The first is resolution diversity. Resizing or padding can distort subtle forensic cues and introduce unnecessary computational cost. The second is the difficulty of extending spatial models for images to spatio-temporal inputs in videos, which often results in maintaining separate architectures for the two data types. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and naturally handles both static and temporal visual data. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global Local Relay (GLR) tokens that propagate structured context through a relay-based attention mechanism. This design enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior approaches that depend on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer scales to variable resolutions and video sequences with minimal overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate superior performance and strong efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified processing for images and videos, and a favorable balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at~\href{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}{https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer}.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

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

When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime

作者:

arXiv:2606.14589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22 incidents with full root-cause postmortems, in which one meta-pattern – a failure whose error signal never reaches a human in actionable form – manifested at least 28 times. We derive a five-class, mechanism-oriented taxonomy: (A) environment and platform quirks, (B) design-assumption mismatches, (C) error swallowing and dilution, (D) chained hallucination and fabrication, (E) operational omission and forensic blind spots. Class D is unique to LLM systems and the most dangerous: the system does not merely fail to report an error – the LLM transforms it into fluent, plausible narrative delivered to the user. We term this fail-plausible: gray failure's differential observability escalated – the observer is not just blind, it is convincingly lied to by the failure itself. Three findings: about 70% of silent failures were caught by human user-view observation, not tests or audits; a retrospective audit of 15 incidents found 0% ex-ante prevention but 87% regression blocking – audits are regression engines, not prediction engines; incident latency (13 hours to 60 days) tracks failure mechanism, not code complexity – the longest-lived failures lived in the seams between components, where no test runs. We describe the resulting defense framework and distill design principles for agent systems whose failures are loud, attributable, and boring. All postmortems and artifacts are public.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quest for quantum advantage: Monte Carlo wave-function simulations of the Coherent Ising Machine

arXiv:2501.02681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a quantum network of optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) intended to find ground states of the Ising model. This is an NP-hard problem, related to several important minimization problems, including the max-cut graph problem. In order to enhance its potential performance, we analyze the coherent coupling strategy for the CIM in a highly quantum regime. To explore this limit, without assuming gaussianity, we employ accurate numerical simulations. Due to the inherent complexity of the system, the maximum network size is limited. While master equation methods can be used, their scalability diminishes rapidly for larger systems. Instead, we use Monte Carlo wave-function methods, which scale as the wave-function dimension, and use large numbers of samples. These simulations involve Hilbert spaces exceeding $10^{7}$ dimensions. To evaluate success probabilities, we use quadrature probabilities. We demonstrate the potential for quantum computational advantage by reducing the time required to reach maximum success probability in a low-dissipation regime enabled by initial quantum superpositions and entanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that tailored time-dependent couplings can amplify these quantum effects. Comparisons with classical CIM models give evidence that quantum tunneling effects in this strong coupling limit can overcome trapping in false minima. This can greatly increase success rates, indicating a potential for quantum advantage. Finally, we perform a coherence analysis based on the state purity to examine the role of quantum coherence in CIM performance and to determine how state purity correlates with improved optimization outcomes.

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

Handling Feature Heterogeneity with Learnable Graph Patches

arXiv:2606.17667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, the rapid development of foundation models and graph pre-training technologies has spurred increasing interest in constructing a universal pre-trained graph model or Graph Foundation Model (GFM). However, a significant challenge is that existing models are unable to address feature heterogeneity in graph data without textual information, which hinders the transferability of graph models across different datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose the concept of learnable graph patches, which we regard as the smallest semantic units of any graph data. We decompose the graph into learnable graph patches by unfolding the node features and constructing corresponding patch structures separately. We then design a framework that mines transferable information from graph data across domains. Specifically, after extracting graph patches, we propose a patch encoder to extract knowledge from each unit and a patch aggregator to learn how the units are combined into a whole. Due to its domain-agnostic nature, the model can be applied to downstream data across different domains. Furthermore, we analyze the connection between our method and existing graph models, as well as the transferability of the node embeddings it generates. Empirically, our method not only achieves the capability to use multi-domain graphs for pre-training, but also shows enhanced performance across various downstream datasets and tasks. Moreover, we observe consistent improvement in downstream performance as the volume of pre-training data increases.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DiFlow-TTS: Compact and Low-Latency Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Discrete Flow Matching

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress in replicating unseen voices, yet balancing generation quality and inference efficiency remains challenging. Autoregressive models suffer from high latency, while diffusion-based approaches are constrained by training-time configurations. Moreover, most flow-based methods operate in continuous space, which introduces optimization challenges because continuous token spaces are inherently more complex than discrete ones. To address these limitations, we propose DiFlow-TTS, a novel zero-shot TTS framework based on discrete flow matching. The model consists of a deterministic Phoneme-Content Mapper for linguistic modeling and a Factorized Discrete Flow Denoiser that simultaneously generates prosody and acoustic token streams. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple evaluation metrics.

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

Learning Dynamics Reveal a Hierarchy of Weight-Induced Layerwise Gram Metrics

arXiv:2606.09744v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study feed-forward ReLU networks with fixed readout and quadratic loss. The aim is to rewrite gradient descent not primarily as a dynamics in weight space, but as a collective dynamics closed in terms of fields defined on the training-set space. For a single hidden layer, the weight variables can be eliminated from the activation dynamics, yielding a closed equation for the residuals governed by a collective kernel that factorizes into an input-geometric matrix and a dynamical co-activation matrix. For deeper networks, the residual dynamics retains a clean layer-wise kernel structure. However, from depth three onward, closure requires a hierarchy of weight-induced Gram operators that mediate information transport across layers. Moreover, the conjugate-field dynamics is governed by operators satisfying a backward pullback recursion, of which the weight-induced Gram operators are the first nontrivial instances.

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

Attribute Inference from Interactive Targeted Ads

作者:

arXiv:2606.15209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Targeted advertising systems can pair audiences selected by advertisers with ad units that expose visible user actions. When an interaction remains linked to the campaign that elicited it, the advertiser may receive an observation tied to a user rather than only an aggregate report. We model that channel as a noisy oracle for attribute inference. The model separates targeting predicates, exposure, interaction, and disclosure. These boundaries capture the gap between eligibility and delivery, and the gap between interaction and advertiser visibility. We build a reproducible benchmark using synthetic populations calibrated with public data, each with known sensitive labels. A generated campaign semantics layer provides topic variants and response priors. The simulator generates the ground truth, event traces, disclosed observations, and metrics. The evaluation compares Bayesian, supervised, positive and unlabeled, and adaptive attacks under common campaign and disclosure definitions. The final evaluation uses four topic variants, seven simulator seeds, and two interaction settings. Repeated campaigns with identity exposure produce measurable but bounded inference signal. At $160$ campaigns, Bayesian and supervised attacks reach about $0.64$ AUC in the main setting and about $0.65$ AUC in the higher interaction setting. Disclosure policy is the strongest control. Aggregate reporting removes the evaluated oracle input tied to users. Type filtering and randomized disclosure reduce the released signal. The result is a model, artifact, and defense evaluation method for privacy in interactive targeted advertising. The code is available at https://github.com/P-HOW/Interactive-Ad-Oracle.

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

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

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

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

Topological Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.15897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching is a powerful generative modeling framework, valued for its simplicity and strong empirical performance. However, its standard formulation treats signals on structured spaces, such as fMRI data on brain graphs, as points in Euclidean space, overlooking the rich topological features of their domains. To address this, we introduce topological flow matching, a topology-aware generalization of flow matching. We interpret flow matching as a framework for solving a degenerate Schrödinger bridge problem and inject topological information by augmenting the reference process with a Laplacian-derived drift. This principled modification captures the structure of the underlying domain while preserving the desirable properties of flow matching: a stable, simulation-free objective and deterministic sample paths. As a result, our framework serves as a drop-in replacement for standard flow matching. We demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse structured datasets, including brain fMRIs, ocean currents, seismic events, and traffic flows.

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

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Think Again or Think Longer? Selective Verification for Budget-Aware Reasoning

Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes. We study this as a deployment allocation problem rather than a new-verifier problem. We introduce \sevra, Selective Verification for Reasoning Allocation, a serving-layer controller that decides whether to preserve a frozen solver's initial answer or invoke active verification. Using a frozen Qwen3-4B solver, we log intervention outcomes and train recoverability-aware gates from serving-visible attempt state. On \mathfive, selective verification reaches 76.3\% accuracy, compared with 75.5\% for always verifying, while reducing post-generation tokens by 26.8\% and harmful flips from 2.2\% to 1.0\%. However, an 8,192-token initial solve reaches 76.0\% accuracy with 28\% fewer total model tokens, showing that selective recovery is useful but not the best tested cost frontier. In frozen transfer to \gsm, the selective policy verifies only 3.0\% of examples, improves accuracy from 93.4\% to 94.5\%, and reduces verification tokens by 91.2\% relative to always verifying; again, a longer initial solve matches its accuracy with fewer realized tokens. On CommonsenseQA, always-on verification hurts, while Self-Consistency@5 improves accuracy at about five times the realized token cost. The resulting deployment rule is: tune the initial budget first, then use selective recovery when explicit checks, bounded retries, auditability, or regression-risk control matter.

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

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entanglement-Rank Duality in Quadratic Phase Quantum States

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

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Through Occlusion: Deterministic Arm Kinematic Correction for Robot Teleoperation

Markerless, single-RGB-D-camera motion capture provides a low-cost and non-invasive alternative to conventional marker-based systems for robot teleoperation; however, depth estimation often degrades in the presence of self-occlusion, particularly during upper-limb motion. This paper presents an Arm Kinematic Correction (AKC) method that improves depth estimation by enforcing geometric constraints based on constant arm lengths. The proposed approach reconstructs occluded joint depths by leveraging wrist positions and predefined arm lengths via a deterministic formulation based on the Pythagorean theorem, thereby avoiding the need for complex probabilistic modeling or parameter tuning. Experimental validation against a Vicon reference system demonstrates reliable performance for both static and dynamic joint motions, evaluated using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation. Furthermore, motion-mapping teleoperation is successfully demonstrated in both simulated and physical robot environments. The results show that AKC enhances robustness and preserves anatomical consistency under long-duration, severe self-occlusion, even when paired with less reliable temporal filters, highlighting its practicality for real-time applications such as robot teleoperation and human-robot interaction.

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

Ex-Omni: Enabling 3D Facial Animation Generation for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) aim to unify multimodal understanding and generation, yet extending them to jointly produce speech and 3D facial animation remains largely unexplored despite its importance for natural human-computer interaction. A key challenge is the mismatch between the discrete semantic reasoning of LLMs and the dense temporal dynamics required for 3D facial motion. We propose Expressive Omni (Ex-Omni), an open-source model that augments OLLMs with native speech-accompanied 3D facial animation. Ex-Omni decouples semantic reasoning from temporal generation through a blendshape-aware speech unit generator and a blendshape decoder, where speech units provide temporal scaffolding and hidden speech representations carry facially relevant cues. We further introduce a unified token-as-query gated fusion (TQGF) mechanism for controlled semantic injection, as well as InstructS2SF-1200K, a dataset consisting of 1200K samples for pre-training. Extensive experiments show that Ex-Omni maintains competitive speech understanding and generation ability while achieving better audio-visual synchronization and lower face-generation latency than cascaded pipelines.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Shadow Engineering of Quantum Processes

arXiv:2606.12035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterizing quantum processes is essential for hardware benchmarking, error diagnosis, and algorithm verification. While recent work [PRX QUANTUM 4, 040337 (2023)] extended classical shadows from quantum state to quantum process, enabling efficient single-channel $\mathcal{E}$ property prediction, its applicability to composite processes $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ remains unexplored. We introduce shadow engineering, a framework encoding the classical shadows of processes into sparse transfer matrices to predict $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$ properties with proven polynomial sample complexity, matching single-channel efficiency while exponentially lower than quantum process tomography. Crucially, this approach repurposes existing $\mathcal{E}_m$-shadow data without physical execution of $f(\mathcal{E}_1, \mathcal{E}_2,\cdots, \mathcal{E}_k)$, enabling flexible quantum process characterization with minimal hardware overhead. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and practicality on a superconducting quantum processor for typical applications such as error mitigation and Hamiltonian dynamical simulation. This framework unlocks new capabilities for predicting complex quantum behaviors without physical re-execution, with immediate applications in near-term device calibration and quantum simulation.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Emerging Flexible Designs for Geospatial Multimodal Foundation Models

Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth observation by enabling scalable pretraining across diverse unlabeled geospatial modalities. However, their architectural diversity ranging from encoder-only to encoder-decoder and masked autoencoding paradigms makes it challenging to assess performance trade offs in a consistent manner. In this work, we present an apples-to-apples comparison of leading FM architectures designed for geospatial multimodal reasoning, with a particular focus on flexibility across varied spectral band configurations. We standardize pretraining using identical self supervised learning objectives and training datasets, and evaluate all models under consistent parameterization on the GEOBench benchmark across classification and segmentation tasks. Our results offer new insights into the design trade-offs between model flexibility, modality alignment, and downstream task performance. By highlighting architectural strengths and limitations under controlled conditions, this study provides practical guidance for building next generation geospatial foundation models capable of robust multimodal reasoning.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel to the agent, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. For non-forward actions, we append auxiliary directive regions to the image plane, where the left/right/bottom regions are interpreted as turning left, turning right, and stopping, respectively. To enable long-horizon navigation, we propose a visibility-aware keyframe memory for compact and informative history representation. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance while requiring fewer VLM inference calls than prior methods. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with just 7.75 VLM calls per episode, 6x fewer than the 46.62 required by direct action prediction at 32.9% SR. The same trend holds on RxR-CE.Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.