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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

作者:

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

MUFASA: A Multi-Layer Framework for Slot Attention

Unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) decomposes visual scenes into distinct entities. Slot attention is a popular approach that represents individual objects as latent vectors, called slots. Current methods obtain these slot representations solely from the last layer of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT), ignoring valuable, semantically rich information encoded across the other layers. To better utilize this latent semantic information, we introduce MUFASA, a lightweight plug-and-play framework for slot-attention-based approaches to unsupervised object segmentation. Our model computes slot attention across multiple feature layers of the ViT encoder, fully leveraging their semantic richness. We propose a fusion strategy to aggregate slots obtained on multiple layers into a unified object-centric representation. Integrating MUFASA into existing OCL methods improves their segmentation results across multiple datasets, setting a new state of the art while simultaneously improving training convergence with only minor inference overhead.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Convergence rate of Euler–Maruyama scheme to the invariant probability measure under total variation distance for the SDEs

arXiv:2505.04218v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article shows the geometric decay rate of Euler-Maruyama scheme for one-dimensional stochastic differential equation towards its invariant probability measure under total variation distance. Firstly, the existence and uniqueness of invariant probability measure and the uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are studied through introduction of non-atomic Markov chains. Secondly, the equivalent conditions for uniform geometric ergodicity of the chain are discovered, by constructing a split Markov chain based on the original Euler-Maruyama scheme.

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

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

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

The Hidden Power of Scaling Factor in LoRA Optimization

arXiv:2606.12883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), the scaling factor $\alpha$ is often treated as a mere complement to the learning rate, yet its role in optimization remains poorly understood. In this paper, we reveal that the scaling factor $\alpha$ and the learning rate function differently, with $\alpha$ emerging as the dominant driver of effective optimization, delivering gains that cannot be replicated by learning rate scaling alone. Through the synergy of extensive empirical analysis and a theoretical Signal-Drift framework, we uncover three findings into LoRA's scaling mechanism: First, LoRA's spectral suppression smooths the optimization landscape, rendering standard hyperparameters overly conservative and creating an optimization gap. Second, when leveraging this smoothness to accelerate convergence, $\alpha$ outperforms the learning rate by amplifying the task signal without increasing the drift ratio. Third, the optimal scaling factor follows a sublinear relationship with the rank, well characterized by a square-root law with an unexpectedly large coefficient, revealing the insufficient scaling of existing rank-tied heuristics. Based on these insights, we propose LoRA-$\alpha$, a minimalist framework that restores $\alpha$ to its principled regime, making LoRA compatible with standard small learning rates. Extensive evaluations across diverse tasks demonstrate that LoRA-$\alpha$ consistently improves performance while streamlining hyperparameter search, unleashing the learning potential of LoRA.

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

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When does dissipation help neural surrogates learn open quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dissipation is usually viewed as an obstacle to predicting quantum dynamics, yet it can also contract trajectories toward steady states and thereby suppress accumulated prediction errors, leaving it unclear whether dissipation ultimately helps or hinders the learnability of open quantum dynamics. We investigate this question using Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) surrogates for open Heisenberg XYZ spin chains. Closed-system learnability deteriorates rapidly with system size, culminating in a static-prediction collapse at four qubits; dissipation reverses this trend, creating a broad high-fidelity regime at intermediate system sizes, while at four qubits a fidelity-aware objective recovers learnable rollout structure that is absent under closed-system training. Comparison against static and steady-state baselines reveals that dissipation improves performance through two fundamentally different mechanisms: at weak-to-moderate dissipation the surrogate captures nontrivial transient dynamics and substantially outperforms trivial predictors, whereas at stronger damping high fidelity increasingly reflects trajectory simplification toward the steady state rather than improved learned dynamics. These results show that dissipation can enhance the learnability of open quantum dynamics, but that fidelity alone is insufficient to distinguish genuine dynamical learning from steady-state trivialization: dissipative contraction and trajectory simplification are distinct effects that peak in different regimes and should be disentangled when evaluating learned quantum-dynamical surrogates.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

GPR15-guided CD8<sup>+</sup> T regulatory cells control intestinal inflammation

作者:

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) causes chronic suffering from gastrointestinal inflammation and dysfunction that can progress to colon cancer1,2. The disease prevalence is increasing and there is an urgent need to better understand its pathogenic mechanisms to improve treatment. We show that GPR15, a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) expressed in immune cells and previously described as an entry co-factor for human and simian immunodeficiency viruses3, is a marker and homing receptor for a subset of intramucosal GPR15-guided regulatory CD8+ T lymphocytes (CD8+ TIGR). Deleterious GPR15 gene variants in humans cause defective homing of CD8+ TIGR and are associated with severe early-onset IBD. Moreover, CD8+ TIGR cells are reduced in the intestinal mucosa of sporadic IBD patients. In mice, GPR15 deficiency impairs colonic homing of CD8+ TIGR cells, leading to accumulation of inflammatory macrophages and increased susceptibility to colitis. CD8+ TIGR cells potently kill macrophages activated by intestinal damage or disease using Fas ligand (FasL) and TNF-related weak inducer of apoptosis (TWEAK). The identification of CD8+ TIGR cells yields new insights into organ-specific immune regulation and potential therapeutics for IBD.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improve Large Language Model Systems with User Logs

Scaling training data and model parameters has long driven progress in large language models (LLMs), but this paradigm is increasingly constrained by the scarcity of high-quality data and diminishing returns from rising computational costs. As a result, recent work is increasing the focus on continual learning from real-world deployment, where user interaction logs provide a rich source of authentic human feedback and procedural knowledge. However, learning from user logs is challenging due to their unstructured and noisy nature. Vanilla LLM systems often struggle to distinguish useful feedback signals from noisy user behavior, and the disparity between user log collection and model optimization (e.g., the off-policy optimization problem) further strengthens the problem. To this end, we propose UNO (User log-driveN Optimization), a unified framework for improving LLM systems (LLMsys) with user logs. UNO first distills logs into semi-structured rules and preference pairs, then employs query-and-feedback-driven clustering to manage data heterogeneity, and finally quantifies the cognitive gap between the model's prior knowledge and the log data. This assessment guides the LLMsys to adaptively filter out noisy feedback and construct different modules for primary and reflective experiences extracted from user logs, thereby improving future responses. Extensive experiments show that UNO achieves state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency, significantly outperforming Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and memory-based baselines. We have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/bebr2/UNO .

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RT-VLA: Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Models via Knowledge Distillation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by jointly modeling visual perception, language reasoning, explainability and action prediction. However, their large vision-language backbones and reasoning modules introduce substantial inference latency and thereby prevent their deployment in the unforgiving reality of the road networks. We propose RT-VLA, a lightweight, distilled VLA model that transfers the driving and reasoning capabilities of the state-of-the-art SimLingo model into a compact student through multi-level supervised distillation. RT-VLA preserves language-based reasoning and supports post-hoc explanation through offline language analysis of safety-critical driving moments without adding latency to real-time control. Compared to the SimLingo teacher, RT-VLA maintains competitive closed-loop driving and language reasoning performance while reducing inference time by 44.8X in vision-only mode and 7.9X in vision+language mode. These results suggest that supervised distillation is a practical approach for building real-time, explainable VLA-style autonomous driving models.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Towards Federated Long-Tailed Graph Learning: An Energy-Guided Dual Decoupling Approach

arXiv:2606.24237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated Graph Learning facilitates collaborative graph modeling across distributed clients while preserving data privacy. However, real-world data categories frequently exhibit long-tailed distributions. Such statistical scarcity severely degrades performance in two ways: it biases the global model toward majority classes, and it structurally isolates minority nodes by submerging them in heterophilic, head-dominated neighborhoods. While existing methods attempt topology-agnostic statistical compensations, they often fail under data scarcity. Instead of recovering tail nodes, they overfit the structural noise from adjacent dominant classes, leading to representation degradation. To address these limitations, we propose FedEPD, a framework built on a dual decoupling paradigm that separates topological purification from semantic recalibration. Specifically, FedEPD utilizes distribution-aware Dirichlet energy pruning to filter spatial heterophilic edges. It then overcomes Non-IID distribution shifts by extracting robust global prototypes from topologically central nodes, which are incorporated into local representations via a spatial low-pass prototype injection. Furthermore, a two stage alternating optimization strategy strictly protects majority decision boundaries while improving minority accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedEPD achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed benchmarks, yielding absolute improvements of up to 4.97% in Accuracy and 5.48% in Macro-F1.

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

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

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

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

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

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory. We propose Gefen, a memory-efficient optimizer that automatically shares second-moment estimates across parameter blocks and quantizes the first moment using a learned codebook, thereby reducing AdamW's memory footprint by ~8x while maintaining the same performance, corresponding to a reduction of 6.5 GiB per billion parameters. The method is motivated by a theoretical result showing that large mixed Hessian entries constrain the ratio of squared gradients toward one, suggesting that Hessian-aligned parameters are natural candidates for sharing second-moment statistics. Since computing Hessians is impractical at scale, Gefen infers block structure from the initial squared gradients, requiring no architecture-specific metadata or hyperparameters beyond AdamW defaults. Gefen learns an exact histogram-based dynamic-programming quantization codebook and reuses the same blocks for first-moment scaling. Across diverse experiments, Gefen achieves the lowest peak optimizer memory among the compared AdamW-like methods while maintaining AdamW-level performance. In FSDP and DDP training, the reduced memory footprint enables larger microbatches and improves throughput significantly over AdamW, providing a practical drop-in replacement with lower memory usage that can increase throughput and enable training larger models or using larger batch sizes. We provide the complete Python implementation, including fused CUDA kernels at https://github.com/ndvbd/Gefen

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

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

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

CSPO: Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to maximize expected return while satisfying safety constraints, typically modeled as Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). While primal-dual methods scale well to deep RL, they often suffer from delayed constraint correction, leading to oscillatory behavior and prolonged safety violations. In this paper, we propose Constraint-Sensitive Policy Optimization (CSPO), a first-order primal-dual method that incorporates local constraint sensitivity into policy updates. CSPO augments the primal objective with a constraint-sensitive correction derived from the shortest signed distance to the safety boundary, enabling smarter recovery steps back to safety, compensating for delayed Lagrange multiplier updates, reducing oscillations near the boundary, and preserving the KKT solutions of the original constrained problem. Experiments on navigation and locomotion benchmarks demonstrate that CSPO achieves faster safety recovery and high reward preservation, resulting in higher constrained returns compared to state-of-the-art primal-dual and penalty-based methods

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifferAD-R1: A Difference-Guided IndustrialAnomaly Localization with Multimodal LargeLanguage Models

Industrial anomaly localization aims to accurately identify and localize abnormal regions in industrial products, addressing the critical challenge of detecting unseen defect categories in real-world scenarios. Traditional closed-set methods often suffer from poor cross-scenario generalization, while existingMultimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approachesface two core limitations: they either adopt QA-style paradigmsmisaligned with the practical demands of localization, or relyon standard optimization techniques such as Group RelativePolicy Optimization (GRPO), which fails to deliver effectivelearning signals for subtle defects. To tackle these issues, thispaper proposes DifferAD-R1, an MLLM-augmented reinforcement learning framework tailored for industrial anomaly localization. We design a Difference-Guided dual-image paradigm,which reformulates the localization task as a one-shot difference grounding problem to effectively explore cross-scenarioanomalies. A Dual-Consistency Localization Reward is developedfor hard-to-detect anomalies, enhancing optimization stabilityand robustness. Additionally, we integrate a difficulty-awarestrategy with adaptive reweighting and group-wise resamplingto prioritize learning on challenging instances. To facilitateevaluations in real-world industrial settings, we construct theAD-DualDiff dataset, comprising 13K paired images across 20categories. Experimental results demonstrate that DifferADR1 significantly outperforms existing baselines and achievescompetitive performance compared to large-scale models likeQwen3-VL (235B parameters). Our code is publicly availableat: https://github.com/Rong2026/work-1.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

作者:

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Divide, Deliberate, Decide: A Multi-Agent Framework for Fine-Grained Egocentric Action Recognition

Fine-grained action recognition in egocentric video is challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs): actions often differ only in small visual cues, and a single model tends to be biased toward a subset of these cues. We propose Divide, Deliberate, Decide, a fully-local, zero-shot multi-agent framework in which (i) a VLM orchestrator chunks the video and proposes a top-k candidate label list per segment, (ii) an ensemble of heterogeneous VLM specialists, drawn from different open model families, engages in a structured deliberation that includes a peer-consultation round of questions, and (iii) agent rankings are aggregated with a Borda count and the orchestrator re-ranks its own prediction in light of the specialists' evidence. The entire pipeline runs locally with no fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method positively improves zero-shot action recognition performance over the baseline, highlighting the influence of a heterogeneous deliberation step, showing that the gain stems from decorrelated model priors rather than from additional compute.

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

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

arXiv:2606.16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.

25.
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 $0.999$.