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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SleepMaMi: A Universal Sleep Foundation Model for Integrating Macro- and Micro-structures

arXiv:2602.07628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While the shift toward unified foundation models has revolutionized many deep learning domains, sleep medicine remains largely restricted to task-specific models that focus on localized micro-structure features. These approaches often neglect the rich, multi-modal context of Polysomnography (PSG) and fail to capture the global macro-structure of a full night's sleep. To address this, we introduce SleepMaMi , a Sleep Foundation Model engineered to master both hour-long sleep architectures and fine-grained signal morphologies. Our framework utilizes a hierarchical dual-encoder design: a Macro-Encoder to model full-night temporal dependencies and a Micro-Encoder to capture short-term characteristics from biosignals. Macro-Encoder is trained via Demographic-Guided Contrastive Learning, which aligns overnight sleep patterns with objective subject metadata, such as age, sex and BMI to refine global representations. Micro-Encoder is optimized via a hybrid Masked Autoencoder (MAE) and multi-modal contrastive objective. Pre-trained on a massive corpus of $>$20,000 PSG recordings (158K hours),SleepMaMi outperforms or matches state-of-the-art existing foundation models across a diverse suite of downstream tasks, demonstrating superior generalizability and label-efficient adaptation for clinical sleep analysis.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

When Dynamics Models Read the Wrong Time Steps: Label-Free Event Credit Re-Anchoring for Robust Global Readouts

作者:

arXiv:2606.17572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned dynamics models often answer global physical questions, such as fault severity or impact stiffness, by pooling a per-step feature sequence into one readout vector. This sequence-to-global interface creates an under-studied temporal credit problem: with only trajectory-level supervision, a model can predict accurately in training conditions while reading from abundant smooth correlates rather than the brief physical events that determine the target. We call this failure temporal credit dilution. It is not exposed by the training loss and is not removed by standard physics-informed residuals, because the error lies in where the global readout assigns functional credit. We introduce Credit-in-Event, an interface-level probe for measuring how much pooled credit lands on event steps, and prove in closed form that a pooled linear reader routes credit to a spurious background channel as the event fraction shrinks. We then propose CREST, a training-free and label-free readout that estimates a transient event core from learned features and re-anchors the pooled representation through event-versus-rest contrast. Across simulated gear and impact systems, recurrent and attention encoders, and public bearing vibration data, CREST reduces out-of-distribution error while restoring event credit. Ablations show that stable-step selection and receptive-field shrinking fail, confirming that the gain comes from event-core credit re-anchoring rather than a generic locality or stability prior.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

On the QUEST for Uncertainty Quantification via Highest Density Regions

arXiv:2606.19569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for reliable decision-making in safety-critical applications in probabilistic machine learning. For regression problems, dominant scalar UQ approaches - notably, those based on proper scoring rules - measure uncertainty via pointwise predictive risk. This can lead to counterintuitive results when the target statistic is not the conditional expectation. We propose an alternative framework, in which uncertainty is characterised by the volume of the most probable subset of a distribution's support. QUEST (Quantifying Uncertainty via highest dEnSiTy regions) is a novel approach to UQ based on the concentration of Lebesgue measure at a distribution's peak(s), evaluated at one or more values of a robustness parameter $\alpha$. We establish connections between our measures and classical statistics from information theory and economics. We show that, unlike popular alternatives based on proper scoring rules, QUEST measures of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty satisfy a set of axioms adapted from the UQ literature, including monotonicity under distributional spread and invariance to location shifts. Selective prediction benchmarks confirm that QUEST performs favourably against standard measures such as variance and differential entropy.

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

Sparse positive maps on qutrits with exact nondecomposability thresholds and PPT-entanglement transitions

arXiv:2606.19765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a family of sparse positive maps on qutrits for which positivity, decomposability, and PPT entanglement can all be analysed explicitly. The block structure of the associated Choi matrices reduces positivity to a Hermitian biquadratic form and leads to exact positivity boundaries for three representative parametric families. For the same families we determine the exact transition between decomposable and non-decomposable maps and construct associated PPT states of two classes. The first consists of witness-adapted deformations naturally tied to the non-decomposability analysis. The second consists of analytically tractable families whose full PPT-entangled branch is detected by fixed positive maps, yielding exact thresholds between separability and bound entanglement. For the trace-preserving subclass, we further compare positivity with a recent eigenvalue bound for 2-positive maps, thereby making the gap between positivity and higher-order positivity fully explicit within this family.

07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-01

Prenatal exposure to asthma medications and risk of neurodevelopmental disorders and educational difficulties: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Lama A. Shakhshir, Alexia Karain, Jill P. Pell, Claire E. Hastie, Scott M. Nelson, Michael Fleming Background Since asthma exacerbations during pregnancy risk maternal and fetal health, continued medication is important. However, some studies have reported adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes following prenatal exposure to asthma medication. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to collate the existing evidence on the associations between prenatal exposure to asthma medication and neurodevelopmental and educational outcomes. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines and the PECO framework. PubMed, Medline and Embase databases were searched for studies investigating prenatal exposure to one or more asthma medication and neurodevelopmental or educational outcomes published, in English, between January 2003 and September 2024, and updated in November 2025. Studies of asthma medication used for other indications were excluded. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Random-effects meta-analyses were conducted where appropriate and heterogeneity was evaluated using Cochran’s Q and I2 tests.Of 16,824 studies identified by the initial search, seven were eligible for inclusion. All investigated beta-2-adrenergic agonists (B2AA), with one including B2AA as mono- and polytherapy—and one study also investigated inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) exposure. Two reported associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and one with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An updated search identified one additional eligible study, which examined both ADHD and ASD, as well as other neurodevelopmental disorders. The included eight studies (n = 3,867,170 participants) comprised cohort (n = 5) and case-control (n = 3) designs and reported inconsistent results. Meta-analysis of three studies (n = 1,380,871) indicated significant associations with ASD for exposure to B2AA both preconception (aOR 1.34, 95% CI [1.19,1.52]) and during pregnancy (aOR 1.29, 95% CI [1.16,1.42]). Heterogeneity was low, with no evidence of significant publication bias. Limitations of the included studies comprised residual confounding and exposure misclassification. Additionally, studies included in the meta-analysis were few in number and did not adequately distinguish between medication effects and underlying maternal asthma. Conclusion Meta-analysis suggested an association between prenatal exposure to B2AA and ASD. An association with ADHD, reported in a single study, requires corroboration. To date, based on our search strategy, no association has been reported with communication skills, motor skills, problem-solving and personal-social skills, or cerebral palsy.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MinhwaNet: Faithful but Insufficient Object Grounding in Korean Folk Painting

Korean folk painting (minhwa) is built from a small vocabulary of auspicious symbols, a tiger for protection, a pair of birds for marital harmony, a peony for wealth, that recur across many of its painted genres. This suggests an obvious computational approach, identify which symbols appear in a painting and read the genre from the inventory. Working with a public corpus that pairs whole paintings, eight-field bilingual curatorial captions, and a separate set of expert object crops, we find that this approach does not work. A model given only a list of which symbols a painting contains predicts the genre far worse than a model that fuses the image with the curatorial text, and forcing the genre representation to be object-grounded actively hurts accuracy. The visual evidence on which the genre prediction rests is nonetheless localized and inspectable. A leakage-safe object evidence map projected from a part-level detector is spatially faithful to where curators isolated symbolic objects and to a patch-based surrogate's own gradient saliency. We name this configuration a faithful-but-insufficient dissociation. The part-level explanation is honest about what the part-level model sees, yet the genre target turns on how symbols are arranged rather than on which ones appear. The same lens separates a content label that survives transfer to held-out source institutions, genre, from a style label that does not, era, a prediction we confirm on two further labels in the corpus. We release the multimodal system, a worked-example reading of one painting's evidence map against its catalogue, and a set of evaluation cautions that recur in long-tailed heritage collections.

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

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

KEPLA: A Knowledge-Enhanced Deep Learning Framework for Accurate Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2506.13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery. While recent deep learning approaches have demonstrated promising results, they often rely solely on structural features of proteins and ligands, overlooking their valuable biochemical knowledge associated with binding affinity. To address this limitation, we propose KEPLA, a novel deep learning framework that explicitly integrates prior knowledge from Gene Ontology and ligand properties to enhance prediction performance. KEPLA takes protein sequences and ligand molecular graphs as input and optimizes two complementary objectives: (1) aligning global representations with knowledge graph relations to capture domain-specific biochemical insights, and (2) leveraging cross attention between local representations to construct fine-grained joint embeddings for prediction. Experiments on two benchmark datasets across both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that KEPLA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, interpretability analyses based on knowledge graph relations and cross attention maps provide valuable insights into the underlying predictive mechanisms.

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

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.

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

Noise-Driven Exploration and Transient Freezing Select Flat Minima in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2601.10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium mechanism that governs solution selection during training. Numerical experiments reveal a transient exploratory phase in which SGD trajectories repeatedly escape sharp valleys and migrate toward flatter regions of the loss landscape before becoming confined to a final basin. Using a tractable physical model, we show that SGD noise reshapes the loss landscape into an effective potential that preferentially stabilizes flat solutions. We further uncover a transient freezing mechanism: as training progresses, the flattening landscape suppresses transitions between competing valleys. Stronger SGD noise delays this freezing transition, prolonging the exploratory phase and thereby increasing the probability of convergence to flatter minima. Together, these results provide a unified physical framework connecting learning dynamics, loss-landscape geometry, and generalization, and suggest guiding principles for the design of more effective optimization algorithms.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Amylo-Pipe: an integrated web server for mechanistic and kinetic prediction of protein and peptide aggregation

Protein aggregation is central to amyloid-related disorders and remains a major developability challenge for protein therapeutics. Over the past two decades, significant advances have been made to predict aggregation-prone regions (APRs) and estimate aggregation propensity in proteins and peptides. In contrast, the prediction of aggregation kinetics has received relatively less attention due to the limited availability and heterogeneity of experimental data. Consequently, aggregation propensities from APR prediction algorithms were widely accepted as a means to predict relative changes in the aggregation kinetics of proteins and mutants. Previous studies have demonstrated, using large-scale datasets, that aggregation propensity shows a weak or inconsistent correlation with aggregation kinetics. In the present study, we have integrated complementary state-of-the-art mechanistic and kinetic prediction tools for protein aggregation into a unified, user-friendly web framework entitled "Amylo-Pipe". Amylo-Pipe also implements practical features that are especially useful for protein engineering, such as gatekeeper-residue mutational scanning to support the design of aggregation-resistant variants. By consolidating multiple prediction tasks in a single interface, Amylo-Pipe enables a more comprehensive assessment of aggregation behavior than APR-only workflows. The web server is freely accessible at: https://web.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo2/amylopipe/.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

作者:

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

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

Advancing DialNav through Automatic Embodied Dialog Augmentation

arXiv:2606.19948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For embodied agents capable of physical interaction, the capability to create and understand dialog is crucial to ensure both safety and effectiveness. While DialNav[han2025dialnav] provides a framework for holistic evaluation of the dialog–execution loop in photorealistic indoor navigation, its performance remains limited by a critical scarcity of training data (2K episodes). To address this, we propose an automatic generation pipeline, and construct the RAINbow dataset, a large-scale training dataset with 238K episodes for DialNav. Our pipeline converts existing VLN datasets into multi-turn dialog and creates cost-efficient and high-quality dataset. Then, we introduce two additional complementary advances to unlock the data's full potential: (1) Dual-Strategy Training, a navigation training scheme to align the navigation training with the dynamic dialog-navigation loop, and (2) a localization model that leverages VLN knowledge. By combining these complementary solutions, our model substantially outperforms the baseline in success rate on both Val Seen (58.24, +89\%) and Val Unseen (29.05, +100\%) splits, establishing a new state of the art.

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

Optimizing resource bounds in direct fidelity estimation

arXiv:2606.16336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct fidelity estimation provides a way to estimate the fidelity between an experimentally prepared state and a desired pure target state without performing full tomography. Two influential formulations were introduced in 2011 by Flammia and Liu and by da Silva, Landon-Cardinal, and Poulin. In these protocols, the total estimation error is controlled through two distinct probabilistic steps: first, the fidelity is approximated using randomly sampled Pauli observables; second, each sampled expectation value is estimated from finitely many measurement outcomes. In this work we show that additional structural information about the noise can substantially sharpen the corresponding resource bounds. In particular, for some canonical channels the effective number of sampled Pauli settings can be reduced, leading to lower measurement cost both in the general pure-state setting and in the case of a stabilizer state. These results illustrate a broader point: worst-case confidence bounds in direct fidelity estimation can be significantly conservative when experimentally relevant structure is ignored. As a technical ingredient, we also revisit the allocation of the total accuracy and confidence budgets between the two probabilistic steps. Reformulating the analysis in terms of separate error parameters yields a constrained optimization problem whose solution lowers the average number of measurements in the general pure-state setting. Numerical simulations based on quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit illustrate both the improvement obtained under structured-noise assumptions and the conservativeness of the original worst-case bounds.

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

The Vision Encoder as a Privacy Boundary: Visual-Token Side Channels in Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models

A vision encoder compresses image pixels into semantic embeddings, implicitly acting as a privacy boundary by preserving semantic content while attenuating pixel-local detail required for exact text recovery. Encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) remove this boundary by routing image patches directly into the language-model token stream, thereby exposing an architectural privacy attack surface: intermediate visual tokens become a pre-output side channel. Under a token-access adversary, decoders invert visual-token streams from two encoder-free VLMs, Gemma4 and Fuyu, recovering recognizable image structure and readable held-out access codes, whereas matched encoder-based controls localize target regions but recover no exact strings. Within-model ablations show that the operative factor is spatial sampling fidelity of the visual-token grid, especially character-direction sampling density, rather than token or value count. The leakage is not limited to exported tokens: Gemma4 layer-0 key-value cache tensors are directly invertible, placing the side channel within KV caches commonly persisted by production serving stacks for decoding efficiency. The attack survives clutter, realistic document degradation, and zero-shot transfer to public document images, and it resists value-level defenses such as additive noise and quantization. Effective mitigation must therefore reduce spatial sampling, making removal of the vision encoder a first-class privacy decision in VLM deployment.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sequential Deep Learning to Predict Non-Central to Central Geographic Atrophy Progression from OCT Imaging

Purpose: To develop and validate a temporal deep learning framework for predicting geographic atrophy (GA) progression across multi-year horizons using longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) sequences. Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study. Subjects, Participants, and/or Controls: A total of 91 patients with dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) were identified from Wake Forest University School of Medicine (2013-2023), yielding 455 OCT volumes. Two prediction cohorts were defined: 32 patients with no GA (NGA) at baseline who subsequently developed GA, and 35 patients whose earliest GA manifestation was non-central GA (NCGA). Non-progressing patients served as negative controls. Methods: OCT B-scan volumes were encoded into visit-level feature representations using three pretrained architectures (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16). Chronologically ordered visit embeddings, optionally augmented with inter-visit time intervals ({Delta}t), were processed through recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory networks (LSTM), and Transformer encoders to model longitudinal disease trajectories. Models were trained and evaluated independently for prediction horizons of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 years using patient-level stratified splits (80/20). Performance was assessed across five random seeds. Main Outcome Measures: Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), F1-score, and accuracy for predicting two clinically critical transitions: NGA to GA onset and NCGA to central GA (CGA) involvement. Results: For NGA to GA prediction, models achieved ROC-AUC of 0.84-0.94 at 2-4 years and 1.00 at 5-6 years. For NCGA to CGA prediction, Transformer-based models achieved peak AUC of 0.95 at 4 years and 0.96 at 5 years. Longer input sequences (8 visits vs. 4 visits) consistently improved NCGA to CGA performance at extended horizons. Temporal interval encoding improved stability in several LSTM configurations.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Code Correctness Signals in LLM Hidden States: Pre-Generation Probing and Repair Geometry

arXiv:2606.14530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models encode rich information in their hidden states. This work asks whether code correctness is legible in the hidden states of Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, before it generates and as it repairs a failed attempt, studied on 444 LiveCodeBench tasks. It reports two findings connected by a single confound-control tool: residualization. First, the correctness of the model's first-attempt code is linearly decodable from the prompt-final hidden state, with a leakage-free held-out AUC of 0.931 +/- 0.008 across 50 outer splits. After the linear effect of prompt length is removed from each hidden state dimension, the probe still reaches 0.911 +/- 0.010, well above a prompt-length baseline of 0.754 +/- 0.014. Second, on 236 cleaned cases where the model attempts to repair a failed first attempt, the hidden state shift from the failing attempt to its repair carries a statistically detectable contrastive direction, significant on both a magnitude and a split-half test against label-shuffled nulls. This direction does not survive a conditional residualization against repair-context covariates that differ between successful and failed repairs, marking it as a correlate of repair success driven by the repair context rather than an isolated repair-comprehension feature. The probe layer is selected by nested cross-validation, and the same residualization approach that upholds the pre-generation correctness result overturns the repair-direction interpretation. The contribution is as much methodological as empirical: a diagnostic honest enough to report a negative result alongside a positive one.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored. We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for $\mathsf{QNC}^0$. For each $d\ge 12$, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-$(d-1)$ quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than $d$ by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every $d$, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of $\mathsf{QNC}^0$ over $\mathsf{NC}^0$. A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits. These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within $\mathsf{QNC}^0$, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.