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

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and Financial Disclosures into Layout-Faithful and Token-Efficient Pretraining Data

arXiv:2606.18192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Relativistic Locality from Electromagnetism to Quantum Field Theory

arXiv:2412.11532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetism is the paradigm case of a theory that satisfies relativistic locality. This can be proven by demonstrating that, once the theory's laws are imposed, what is happening within a region fixes what will happen in the contracting light-cone with that region as its base. The Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations meet the same standard. We show that this standard can also be applied to quantum field theory (without collapse), examining two different ways of assigning reduced density matrix states to regions of space. Our preferred method begins from field wave functionals and judges quantum field theory to be local. Another method begins from particle wave functions (states in Fock space) and leads to either non-locality or an inability to assign states to regions, depending on the choice of creation operators. We take this analysis of quantum field theory (without collapse) to show that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is local at the fundamental level. We argue that this fundamental locality is compatible with either local or global accounts of the non-fundamental branching of worlds, countering an objection that has been raised to the Sebens-Carroll derivation of the Born Rule from self-locating uncertainty.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

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

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

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

Family-Aware Residual Architecture for Predicting Quantum Circuit Simulation Performance

arXiv:2606.11620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Approximate tensor-network simulators enable classical simulation of quantum circuits beyond the reach of exact methods, but selecting optimal approximation parameters – such as bond dimension thresholds – remains a costly trial-and-error process. We present a family-aware neural architecture that predicts both the minimum approximation threshold required to achieve target fidelity and the expected wall-clock runtime for quantum circuit simulation, given only the circuit's OpenQASM description and execution context. Our key insight is that quantum circuits from different algorithmic families (e.g., QFT, Grover, VQE) exhibit fundamentally distinct simulation cost profiles due to their differing entanglement structures. We employ family-conditioned residual corrections – additive, family-specific adjustments atop a shared backbone, drawing on established conditional computation techniques – enabling the model to capture both universal circuit properties and algorithmic nuances. The architecture incorporates a pretrained family classifier (97.5% accuracy) and domain-informed algorithm fingerprint features derived from gate-composition heuristics. Evaluated on circuits spanning 7–130 qubits across 10 algorithm families, our system achieves 79.5% exact threshold accuracy (91.2% within one rung) and $R^2 = 0.82$ runtime correlation, with inference completing in approximately 50 ms – replacing trial-and-error simulation runs that may take minutes to hours. Ablation studies confirm that family-aware modeling provides the single largest performance improvement (+3.2 percentage points), validating the hypothesis that algorithm family is a first-class feature for simulation cost prediction.

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

OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) Entity-Anchored Video Scripting transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) Clue-Guided QA Generation prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset OmniVideo-100K and a human-verified test set, OmniVideo-Test. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-based Visual Code Completion for Aerospace Geometric Design

Recent advances in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have seen a step change in their ability to perform visual code completion, but the aerospace industry, which prioritizes safety and explainabilty over rapid LLM adoption, currently has no publicly announced LLM-based geometric design copilot systems in commercial use by aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). This paper presents a LLM-based visual programming copilot application for aerospace engineering design tasks, using a visual programming variant of the ReAct methodology and GPT 5.4. In addition to the copilot, we describe Wingbuilder, a new Grasshopper plugin library with custom components for aerospace-specific geometry abstraction, and an associated Aerospace Visual Programming Dataset (AVPD) with 18 aerospace expert designed tasks at different levels of difficulty alongside ground truth solutions. We evaluate our copilot application with a user trial involving two experienced aerospace engineers from a large aircraft manufacturing company. We find our copilot visual programming ReAct methodology was successful in generating suggestions that participants found helpful, but slow ReAct inference times limit its usefulness to more complex time-consuming tasks where waiting for good copilot solution suggestion was worthwhile. Participants reported they liked the tool and would be willing to use it in the future.

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

Assessment of Personality Dimensions Across Situations in Dyadic Role-Play Scenarios

arXiv:2507.19137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality traits. Previous studies in APP have treated personalities as static traits, independent of context. However, perceived personalities can vary by context and situation as shown in psychological research. In this study, we investigate the relationship between conversational speech and perceived personality for participants engaged in two work situations (a neutral interview and a stressful client interaction). Our key findings are: 1) perceived personalities differ significantly across interactions, 2) loudness, sound level, and spectral flux features are indicative of perceived extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness in neutral interactions, while neuroticism correlates with these features in stressful contexts, 3) handcrafted acoustic features and non-verbal features outperform speaker embeddings in inference of perceived personality, and 4) stressful interactions are more predictive of neuroticism, aligning with existing psychological research.

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

Quantum simulation of the Liouville equation in classical mechanics with discontinuous potential via Schrödingerization

arXiv:2606.15066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop quantum simulation algorithms for the Liouville equation of classical mechanics with discontinuous potential. Such discontinuities represent potential barriers at which classical particles undergo energy preserving transmission or reflection, and the resulting interface conditions must be incorporated into the numerical flux. We combine Hamiltonian-preserving schemes by Jin and Wen in Commun. Math. Sci. 3(3), 285-315 (2005) with the Schrödingerization method, which embeds the resulting nonunitary semi-discrete dynamics into a unitary Schrödinger type system in one additional auxiliary variable [arXiv:2212.14703, arXiv:2212.13969]. For one-, two-, and $n$-dimensional problems with grid aligned interfaces, we construct sparse matrix representations of the transmission and reflection fluxes using step and hat functions, derive the corresponding Hamiltonians of the Schrödingerized systems, and analyze their sparse-access query complexity. In the sparse-access oracle model, the resulting algorithms have a polynomial dependence on the inverse accuracy and avoid the exponential dependence on the phase-space dimension suffered by classical grid based Hamiltonian-preserving schemes, up to the cost of implementing the oracles and the postselection overhead. We also describe the postselected recovery of the physical solution state and the quantum readout of macroscopic observables such as density and averaged velocity through overlap estimation. Numerical experiments based on classical simulation of the Schrödingerized dynamics validate the proposed formulation and illustrate the correct transmission/reflection behavior at potential barriers.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Stable, bidirectional electro-optic transduction in thin film lithium tantalate

arXiv:2606.12726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient and stable microwave-optical transduction is a key enabling technology for distributed superconducting quantum computing and heterogeneous quantum networks. Electro-optic transducers based on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) have shown strong promise, but demonstrations to date have been limited by various factors such as low frequency bias drift, low efficiency, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we demonstrate the first integrated electro-optic microwave-optical transducers realized in thin-film lithium tantalate (TFLT), a material platform offering Pockels nonlinearity comparable to TFLN together with improved bias stability and high-power handling. We fabricate superconducting microwave resonators coupled to tunable photonic-molecule optical resonators using wafer-scale deep ultraviolet lithography, offering high-throughput production of hundreds of devices per wafer. Across six devices we observe coherent bidirectional conversion between C-band optical photons and 4.9-5.5 GHz microwave photons, with measured on-chip efficiencies and inferred single-photon coupling rates g_0/2{\pi} ~ 1 kHz consistent with theory. Continuous operation over multiple days is achieved using a static bias field with minimal feedback, demonstrating a major operational advantage. We further characterize optical loss statistics, microwave resonator performance, and optically induced added noise under pulsed pumping, finding less than one added photon for 100 microsecond pulses at the highest measured efficiencies. These results establish TFLT as a scalable and robust electro-optic platform for future quantum interconnects and modular quantum processors.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Predicting Cognitive Load from Speech and Interaction Dynamics in Dyadic Conversations

arXiv:2606.12971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating cognitive load from speech has largely been studied in controlled laboratory settings, with limited understanding of its reliability in natural collaborative conversations. We investigate whether speech and interaction dynamics predict perceived cognitive load during dyadic conversations. We analyze audio from 53 dyads performing nine collaborative tasks and extract static acoustic, dynamic, and interaction features to train a two-head Gated Recurrent Unit encoder to predict cognitive load scores. Results show conversational interaction provides useful signals for predicting cognitive load related to time pressure, mental work, effort, and task performance. Temporal demand is associated with turn-taking dynamics such as overlap and speaker switch, while mental demand is linked to imbalanced participation between speakers. These findings highlight the importance of task structure and conversational interaction for modeling cognitive load in natural collaborative settings.

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

CONCORD: Asynchronous Sparse Aggregation for Device-Cloud RAG under Document Isolation

arXiv:2606.15179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique for improving language models by incorporating external knowledge at inference time. As device-cloud collaborative inference makes it feasible to deploy small language models on edge devices, a new setting arises in which private documents remain on the device and public knowledge resides in the cloud. Privacy and policy constraints often forbid raw document exchange, creating a document-isolated dual-end RAG setting. However, existing methods rely on frequent remote synchronization and dense evidence transfer, limiting throughput under realistic latency and bandwidth conditions. To address this issue, we propose CONCORD, an asynchronous sparse aggregation framework for dual-end RAG under document isolation. CONCORD treats the cloud as an asynchronously arriving evidence source rather than a continuously synchronized co-generator. Specifically, we introduce waiting debt control to decide whether each decoding step should continue waiting for remote participation based on the observed return of waiting. We also design a certificate-guided minimal supplementation mechanism that requests only the remote evidence needed to determine the current greedy decision. Steps that consult the cloud preserve the same greedy token as dense dual-end aggregation, while the remaining steps commit locally without remote evidence. Experiments on Natural Questions and WikiText-2 show that CONCORD improves end-to-end throughput over baselines by $1.66\times$ and $2.15\times$, respectively, while reducing per-token communication by over two orders of magnitude and maintaining comparable answer quality and perplexity.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Accounting for uncertainty in the expected treatment effect substantially increases the sample size required for randomised trials: implications for the feasibility of clinical trials in anaesthesia and critical care

Background Multicentre trials in anaesthesia and critical care report low rates of statistically significant differences. This finding may partly reflect conventional sample size methods, which assume a fixed treatment effect. Assurance methods use a design prior to represent uncertainty in the expected treatment effect, which may provide a more realistic way of estimating sample sizes. Methods We calculated power curves across a range of effect sizes, design priors, and sample sizes using frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods and compared the sample sizes required to achieve 80% and 90% power to the conventional method. We standardised the design priors across effect sizes using the coefficient of variation. We derived a theoretical limit for achievable power. We validated a normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution. Results Frequentist and Bayesian assurance methods produced similar power curves across all scenarios. At a coefficient of variation of 0.5 - reflecting realistic prior uncertainty in the expected effect size - both methods required sample sizes that were approximately 1.5 to 3.5 times larger than the conventional method. The theoretical power limit depends only on the coefficient of variation of the design prior and holds true across all effect sizes. The normal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution matched the results obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Conclusions Incorporating clinical uncertainty in the expected effect size substantially increases the sample size required to achieve adequate power, which has important implications for the feasibility of randomised trials in anaesthesia and critical care.

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

Variational Graph Neural Networks for Uncertainty Quantification in Inverse Problems

arXiv:2603.29515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasingly wide use of deep machine learning techniques in computational mechanics has significantly accelerated simulations of problems that were considered unapproachable just a few years ago. However, in critical applications such as Digital Twins for engineering or medicine, fast responses are not enough; reliable results must also be provided. In certain cases, traditional deterministic methods may not be optimal as they do not provide a measure of confidence in their predictions or results, especially in inverse problems where the solution may not be unique or the initial data may not be entirely reliable due to the presence of noise, for instance. Classic deep neural networks also lack a clear measure to quantify the uncertainty of their predictions. In this work, we present a variational graph neural network (VGNN) architecture that integrates variational layers into its architecture to model the probability distribution of weights. Unlike computationally expensive full Bayesian networks, our approach strategically introduces variational layers exclusively in the decoder, allowing us to estimate cognitive uncertainty and statistical uncertainty at a relatively lower cost. In this work, we validate the proposed methodology in two cases of solid mechanics: the identification of the value of the elastic modulus with nonlinear distribution in a 2D elastic problem and the location and quantification of the loads applied to a 3D hyperelastic beam, in both cases using only the displacement field of each test as input data. The results show that the model not only recovers the physical parameters with high precision, but also provides confidence intervals consistent with the physics of the problem, as well as being able to locate the position of the applied load and estimate its value, giving a confidence interval for that experiment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

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

Predicting the Neutrino Mass Ordering Using Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.03745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the neutrino mass ordering remains a central open problem in particle physics. While next-generation long-baseline experiments are expected to resolve this question, current data provide limited sensitivity because the spectral differences between normal and inverted ordering are subtle and entangled with parameter degeneracies. We investigate a machine-learning strategy for mass-ordering determination using a feed-forward neural-network classifier trained on synthetic long-baseline datasets generated with three-flavour oscillation probabilities, matter effects, and statistical fluctuations. We evaluate the classifier against standard $\chi^2$ and $\log\mathcal{L}$ approaches using common discrimination metrics, including receiver-operating-characteristic curves, to quantify sensitivity and to illustrate how operating points can be selected to prioritise purity or efficiency. We find that the neural network achieves performance comparable to conventional fits for the scenarios studied, providing a flexible, independent cross-check of established analyses. The framework can be extended to incorporate systematic uncertainties and to explore joint inference of oscillation parameters, and it may also serve as a pedagogical tool for introducing machine-learning methods in neutrino physics.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Systematic Evaluation of Black-Box Uncertainty Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.19868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, their outputs often remain unreliable and may contain hallucinations, making uncertainty estimation (UE) essential for building trustworthy LLMs. In practice, many mainstream LLMs are only accessible through restricted APIs, where internal signals such as logits and hidden states are unavailable, making black-box UE especially important. However, existing work on black-box UE for LLMs remains fragmented in methodology and lacks a unified empirical comparison. To address this gap, we present a systematic review of black-box UE methods and organize them into five categories: verbalization-based, sampling-based, explanation-based, multi-agent, and hybrid methods. We further build a unified evaluation framework and benchmark 24 representative methods across 4 models and 4 dataset settings. Our results show that no single method consistently dominates across all settings. Nevertheless, methods that reason over and compare candidates in the answer space are generally effective, and hybrid methods that combine multiple uncertainty signals perform well under most conditions. By releasing the benchmark data and a unified evaluation framework, we aim to facilitate reproducible comparisons and support future research, while our empirical findings provide practical guidance for developing future black-box UE methods for LLMs.