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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

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

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

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

Aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition with patch-level self-supervised learning and expanded reciprocal re-ranking

LiDAR place recognition determines one's position on a prior point cloud map. The most studied ground-level LiDAR place recognition suffers from pre-visit requirements, incomplete coverage, and limited perspectives. Using pre-acquired, full-coverage Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data as an aerial prior map overcomes these drawbacks, making cross-view place recognition necessary and advantageous. However, aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition faces significant challenges, including the domain gap between aerial and ground point clouds, and false positives during initial retrieval. To address these challenges, we present a novel retrieval and re-ranking framework for aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition. Based on the priors that neighboring point cloud patches share similar semantics with anchor patch, our retrieval network introduces patch-level self-supervised learning modules at multiple scales and integrates with scene-level learning to improve global feature discriminativeness between aerial and ground point clouds. Furthermore, leveraging the structured spatial distribution of ALS point clouds, we introduce an Expanded Reciprocal (ER) re-ranking algorithm to exploit neighborhood information maximally and refine each feature based on neighbor features, which are then used to update the similarity matrix for final ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our retrieval network outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in average Recall@1 and a 3.2\% improvement in average Recall@1\% on the CS-Urban-Scenes, while also showing the best performance on the CS-Campus3D dataset. Additionally, our ER re-ranking algorithm further boosts the average Recall@1 by 4.9\% on CS-Campus3D and 10.2\% on CS-Urban-Scenes without additional training.

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

Pseudo-Feature Padding: A Lightweight Defense Against False Data Injection in Power Grids

arXiv:2606.20415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks DNNs have achieved remarkable accuracy in various tasks including their application in CyberPhysical Systems CPS for detecting False Data Injection Attacks FDIA during critical operations However the unique infrastructure of CPS makes DNNs vulnerable to exploitation by attackers aiming to evade detection Additionally the distinct nature of CPS presents challenges for conventional defense mechanisms against FDIA This paper proposes an innovative defense framework that strengthens DNNs against such attacks by introducing an additional input layer that performs padding in the input samples using pseudofeature values derived from the inputs statistical distribution This padding increases the input dimensionality in a randomized and dataaware manner making adversarial attacks computationally infeasible due to the nontransferable nature of crafted perturbations and the unpredictability of the padded structure Our method is lightweight modelagnostic and requires no modifications to the core architecture making it highly deployable in realworld CPS settings We evaluated our framework on critical power grid applications such as state estimation using the IEEE 14bus 30bus 118bus and 300bus systems Experiments under adversarial settings demonstrate that our padding strategy significantly improves model robustness with negligible impact on performance and effectively mitigates attacks that would otherwise bypass conventional defenses

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.

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

Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically require curated data and expensive optimization over billions of parameters, and eventually lead to persistent task-specific models. In this work, we introduce Preference alignment of Large Language Models via Residual Steering (PaLRS), a training-free method that exploits preference signals encoded in the residual streams of LLMs. From as few as one hundred preference pairs, PaLRS extracts lightweight, plug-and-play steering vectors that can be applied at inference time to push models toward preferred behaviors. We evaluate PaLRS on various small-to-medium-scale open-source LLMs, showing that PaLRS-aligned models achieve consistent gains on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks while preserving baseline general-purpose performance. Moreover, when compared to models aligned with DPO and SimPO, they perform better with great time-savings. Our findings highlight that PaLRS offers an effective, much more efficient and flexible alternative to standard preference optimization pipelines, offering a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism for alignment with minimal data.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2606.20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

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

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Self-Supervised Learning of Iterative Solvers for Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2409.08066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The real-time solution of parametric optimization problems is critical for applications that demand high accuracy under tight real-time constraints, such as model predictive control. To this end, this work presents a learning-based iterative solver for constrained optimization, comprising a neural network predictor that generates initial primal-dual solution estimates, followed by a learned iterative solver that refines these estimates to reach high accuracy. We introduce a novel loss function based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, enabling fully self-supervised training without pre-solved optimizer solutions. Theoretical guarantees ensure that the training loss function attains minima exclusively at KKT points. A convexification procedure enables application to nonconvex problems while preserving these guarantees. Experiments on two nonconvex case studies demonstrate speedups of up to one order of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solvers such as IPOPT, while achieving orders of magnitude higher accuracy than competing learning-based approaches.

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

Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models

作者:

A model that lies while knowing the truth is the central case ELK cannot handle with behavioral evaluation alone. We ask whether such deception leaves an internal signature distinguishing it from honest error. Our key move is a control for wrongness: we contrast a sleeper agent (knows the truth, lies on trigger) against a naive liar (fine-tuned to emit the same wrong answers with no honest training). Both produce identical wrong outputs; any difference is about knowledge conflict, not incorrectness. We find deceptive forward passes carry a conflict signature - 2.1-2.3x higher residual rank than naive-liar passes on the same wrong answer - strong enough to identify which of two responses is the lie with 100% accuracy and no labels, across GPT-2 small/medium (three seeds) and three instruct models. Across Qwen2.5-1.5B/7B and Phi-3-mini, instructed deception raises residual rank on every tested fact (18/18, 40/40, 34/34); on Phi-3, lies separate perfectly from both honest answers and hallucinations (AUC 1.0, Wilcoxon p~6e-11). The signature survives strategic self-constructed deception (model invents its own lie, AUC 1.0), active concealment attempts (AUC 1.0), and length-controlled replication (20/20, AUC 1.0, p~1e-6). Using basis-free relative representations, a probe trained on one model family detects deception in two other families zero-shot (mean AUC 0.933), surviving simultaneous architecture and format change (AUC 0.821), and transfers across five languages (AUC 1.000, length-controlled). The signature is read-only: detectable but not injectable (0/8 both directions). Honest limitations and six negative experiments are documented in full.

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

One Step Closer to Ground Truth: A Multi-Scale Residual-Aware Representation Learning Pipeline for Predicting Time Series Data

arXiv:2606.10678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based models have emerged as leading paradigms in time-series forecasting in recent years, employing self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. Despite their success, these single-stage forecasting architectures exhibit persistent systematic residual biases arising from structural discrepancies, unmodeled stochastic components, or inadequate multi-scale temporal representations. This limitation persists when residuals are treated as irreducible noise, precluding adaptive correction of structured error patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce a two-stage, model-agnostic framework that explicitly decouples forecasting and residual learning into distinct stages of representation learning. A base transformer first generates the initial predictions. Subsequently, a dedicated meta-corrector dynamically models structured error patterns across multivariate channels, preserves cross-variable dependencies, and iteratively refines the residual bias of the base transformer. By formalizing this pipeline as a hypothesis space expansion, our framework addresses approximation limitations inherent in single-stage architectures, removes reliance on restrictive assumptions, and enables end-to-end learning of complex error dynamics. Evaluated on eight popular benchmark datasets using established protocols, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in standard metrics (MSE, MAE). The results demonstrate the framework's ability to mitigate systematic biases and enhance robustness to complex temporal dynamics, advancing the practical applicability of transformer-based forecasting models.

12.
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.

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

A Low-Rank Subspace Analysis of LLM Interventions

arXiv:2606.14388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interventions designed to modify a particular behavior in LLMs, such as refusal or sycophancy, often produce unintended changes in other behaviors. This lack of targeted control makes it difficult to design and implement reliable safety controls. To understand these side-effects, we introduce a diagnostic framework for analyzing interacting behaviors in LLMs. We model behaviors as low-rank subspaces in activation space, and study how interventions influence across behaviors. Across multiple instruction-tuned models (7B-70B) and across refusal, jailbreak, and sycophancy settings, we find that different behaviors share internal representations, and intervening on one behavior alters others in asymmetric ways. Some behaviors act as upstream control points whose interventions propagate broadly across other behaviors, while others remain more isolated. We relate these effects to two geometric quantities: (i) the overlap between behavior subspaces, measured as the average squared cosine of principal angles, and (ii) the angle between each behavior subspace and the decision subspace (capturing the model's final decision e.g., refuse vs. comply). Empirically, intervention effects on other behaviors tend to be larger for behavior pairs with higher subspace overlap, and for source behaviors whose subspaces lie closer (smaller angle) to the decision subspace. These findings highlight a challenge for targeted behavior control: behaviors are difficult to modify independently, as interventions can propagate through shared representations and asymmetric interactions.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Breaking the Solver Bottleneck: Training Task Generators at the Learnable Frontier

The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model. As reasoning and agentic models improve, fixed task distributions saturate, while naive synthetic generation yields tasks that are trivial, impossible, or ill-posed. Training a task generator with RL to optimize validity and learnability can address this bottleneck, but direct optimization requires repeated solver rollouts per candidate. For software-engineering (SWE) tasks, a single rollout can take tens of minutes; solver-in-the-loop generator training is intractable. We introduce PROPEL, a solver-amortized framework for training task generators at the targeted solve rate. PROPEL trains a lightweight activation probe on a one-time labeled corpus of generated tasks and solver outcomes. The probe predicts target-solver pass rate from a frozen generator reference model and serves as a proxy for solve rate during generator optimization, reducing generator evaluation to a single forward pass. Across math, code, and software-engineering at multiple model scales, PROPEL shifts generation toward the targeted solve rate: for coding, tasks generated at the learnable frontier increase from $10.1\% \rightarrow 20.0\%$ for a Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct solver and from $5.3\% \rightarrow 12.6\%$ for a Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct solver. For SWE, PROPEL increases the share of generations at the targeted solve rate from $9.8\% \rightarrow 19.6\%$ for Qwen3.5-27B on repositories not seen during training of probe and generator.

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

Overcoming the Impedance Mismatch: A Theoretical Roadmap for Fusing Foundation Models and Knowledge Graphs

arXiv:2606.15656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence remains fundamentally divided between the continuous, probabilistic spaces of Foundation Models and the discrete, deterministic structures of Knowledge Graphs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) attempts to connect them by serializing graph data into text, we argue this lexical bridging is merely a superficial patch. In this paper, we formalize the underlying structural and geometric friction as the Impedance Mismatch. By categorizing current neuro-symbolic integration strategies into a three-tiered hierarchy, we demonstrate that neither surface-level prompt injection nor continuous representation alignment can preserve the strict logical motifs required for reliable multi-hop reasoning. We define the specific mathematical limits, such as the Lexical Bottleneck and Topological Collapse, that show current architectures will eventually hallucinate or conflate semantic nodes. To achieve true semantic fusion, we propose a rigorous theoretical roadmap. We advocate for natively internalizing discrete symbolic structures through Structured Residual Streams, utilizing Vector Symbolic Architectures for latent sub-graph injection, and performing model updates via Orthogonal Subspace Editing. This actionable framework paves the way for models that seamlessly fuse the precision of symbolic logic with the expressivity of parametric memory.

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

High-efficiency telecom conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets

arXiv:2603.09824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate high-efficiency telecom frequency conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets using a diamond-type atomic ensemble. By placing a 2.5 MHz heralded-photon spectrum within the high-efficiency region of the converter response, we achieve a conversion efficiency of 79.4(2.6)% while maintaining strong time-resolved correlations and well-defined temporal wavepackets. For a broader 17.4 MHz input bandwidth, the conversion efficiency is reduced to about 55%, whereas the temporal waveform remains largely preserved. This behavior reflects the nearly flat central response of the converter, which mainly causes spectral-edge loss rather than temporal-mode distortion. These results identify spectral matching as an effective route to efficient and low-distortion telecom conversion of narrowband quantum light from atomic systems.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

GeroEngine: Generative single-cell aging trajectories reveal a bidirectionally traversable identity core and direction-specific inflammatory remodeling

作者:

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps aging tissues at high resolution but is destructive, preventing longitudinal tracking; dropout and zero-inflation artifacts, amplified by shift-invariant linear simulations, confound age-associated variability. We developed GeroEngine, a technical-artifact-aware framework combining VAE-based trajectory simulation, LOPO cross-validation, linear baselines, reverse traversal, and reverse-directed network inference. In microglia and HSCs, the VAE reduced technical-artifact carryover while preserving trajectory heterogeneity and improving alignment to artifact-reduced reference manifolds. Consensus GeroTargets and GeroRegulators defined tissue-specific GeroNetworks organized into three pillars: lineage/replication identity collapse, a sex-dimorphic endocrine/stress core, and inflammatory remodeling. Forward and reverse simulations aligned to the common young[->]old aging axis revealed a sign-coherent, direction-specific program: identity/replication targets were bidirectionally recovered, whereas MHC/NF-{kappa}B inflammatory programs were preferentially forward-recovered. These results support identity collapse as a deep traversable core of aging and nominate upstream homeostatic restoration over downstream inflammatory suppression.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Intrinsic Pointer Basis and Irreversible Classicality from Coherence Contraction

arXiv:2604.23304v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work analyzes an operational route to classical behavior for reduced quantum states using the intrinsic reference basis (IRB). Relative to a fixed physical conjugation, the IRB separates intrinsic populations from a real antisymmetric cohesion sector. A globally bounded cohesion index is defined and its exponential contraction is proved for phase-free dephasing dynamics aligned with the IRB; for general aligned dephasing, the corresponding modulus-based coherence functional contracts at the same computable rates. The results provide distance bounds to the IRB-diagonal description and a logarithmic upper bound on the time required to reach a prescribed experimental tolerance. The IRB projectors constitute state-derived candidate pointer sectors, and they become dynamically stable pointer sectors when the effective dephasing generator is aligned with them and damps the relevant inter-sector coherences. Degenerate population sectors lead naturally to block-classicality and protected intra-block coherence. In a two-level active sector, the cohesion index equals fringe visibility, giving a direct interferometric test of the contraction law. The construction is independent of any spacetime- or unification-emergence hypothesis and is intended as a channel-level complement to environment-induced einselection.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ERTS: Adversarial Robustness Testing of Ethical AI via Semantic Perturbation in a Bounded Consequence Space

arXiv:2606.13282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes ethical contexts such as healthcare triage, autonomous vehicle control, and employment screening, formal methods for evaluating their robustness against adversarial manipulation of ethical reasoning remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces the Ethical Robustness Testing System (ERTS), a closed-pipeline framework that: (1) encodes ethical dilemmas into a 22-dimensional Ethical Consequence Space (ECS) grounded in established ethical theory; (2) applies 17 semantic perturbation functions subject to 6 validity constraint classes including a novel semantic coherence constraint; (3) measures decision deviation via a 4-component Ethical Instability Index (EII); and (4) produces domain-adaptive pre-deployment robustness assessment verdicts. We evaluate 4 structured baseline models and 2 production LLMs (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Llama 3.2) across 50 ethical scenarios spanning 8 deployment domains, generating 1,500 adversarial test cases. Results demonstrate that only 33% of models achieve assessment clearance, with the local Llama-3.2 model proving particularly vulnerable to fairness corruption and information degradation attacks (ERS = 0.737). To the best of our knowledge, no existing framework combines a bounded ethical consequence space, semantic coherence constraints, and domain-adaptive assessment in a single adversarial testing pipeline.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Prediction Bottlenecks Don't Discover Causal Structure (But Here's What They Actually Do)

arXiv:2605.09169v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A Mamba state-space model trained only for next-step prediction appears to recover Granger-causal structure through a simple readout $S = |W_{out} W_{in}|$, with early experiments suggesting the phenomenon generalized across architectures and benefited from interventional data at $p < 10^{-5}$. We package the protocol used to test that claim – standardized synthetic generators (VAR/Lorenz/CauseMe-style), three intervention semantics ($do(X=c)$, soft-noise, random-forcing), edge-provenance cards on three real datasets, and size-matched control arms – as a reusable falsification benchmark, and walk the claim through it in five stages. The method-level claim does not survive: (i) a plain linear bottleneck does as well or better; (ii) tuned Lasso beats the bottleneck on synthetic CauseMe-style benchmarks, and on Lorenz-96 (the only real benchmark with unambiguous ground truth) classical PCMCI and Granger lead a tight cluster in which the bottleneck trails; (iii) the headline intervention advantage is roughly 60% a sample-size confound, and the residual disappears under standard $do(X=c)$ interventions, surviving only under a non-standard random-forcing scheme; (iv) even that residual reproduces, with a larger effect, in classical bivariate Granger – the effect is method-agnostic. What survives is a narrow characterization result; the benchmark is the lasting artifact, and each stage above is one of its control arms.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Routers: A Switching-Fabric Framework for Quantum-Native Forwarding

arXiv:2606.17773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forwarding in quantum networks cannot be realized by directly transposing classical switching fabrics, since the no-cloning theorem and the quantum measurement postulate constrain the direct relay of quantum information while ruling out copy-based buffering and inspection. In this paper, we propose a switching-fabric framework for quantum routers based on multipartite entanglement. Specifically, we formalize the notion of an entanglement-based switching fabric, in which a graph state acts as the forwarding resource and entanglement forwarding is realized through local Pauli measurements. We translate the classical notions of blocking and non-blocking operation into structural conditions for entanglement-based fabrics, by deriving the edge-controlled (EC) design principle for non-blocking operation. We instantiate this principle through a monolithic EC crossbar and a modular Clos-type EC fabric, for which we characterize resource scaling and identify the regime where the modular design becomes more resource-efficient than the monolithic one. Finally, a forwarding-latency analysis establishes a fundamental distinction between matching-oblivious and matching-driven forwarding: the proposed EC fabrics realize all requested input-output entanglement links with constant forwarding depth under sufficient measurement parallelism, whereas matching-driven EPR-based fabrics exhibit latency that scales with the number of requested connections. The proposed framework provides a hardware-agnostic foundation for quantum-router switching fabrics.

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

ReFree: Towards Realistic Co-Speech Video Generation via Reward-Free RL and Multilevel Speech Guidance

Speech-driven talking character animation seeks to generate life-like portrait videos that convey natural conversation behavior, aligning facial motion with spoken audio. Although recent advances in video generation have substantially improved realism in video-based animation, achieving both accurate lip articulation and expressive behavior remains challenging. Existing approaches typically trade off precise phoneme-to-lip synchronization against dynamic facial expressions and head motion, yielding animations that are either accurate yet rigid, or expressive but poorly synchronized. We address this challenge by proposing ReFree-S2V, a flow-matching speech-to-portrait animation framework that builds upon a pretrained video generation model to achieve fine-grained speech articulation and high-level expressive cues in speech-driven portrait animation. This model introduces a multi-level speech representation capturing phonetic and prosodic information at both local and global granularities. These representations are selectively injected into transformer blocks via learnable level selectors, enabling both accurate lip synchronization and natural expressive motion. To achieve natural head movements, we further introduce a novel reward-free reinforcement learning scheme into flow-matching training to discourage perceptually implausible motion without relying on handcrafted synchronization metrics or reward models, or the high cost of human preference annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReFree-S2V achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in both quantitative lip-sync accuracy and qualitative human evaluations of naturalness and expressivity.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Light-induced nonadiabatic dissipative quantum dynamics of the Na2 molecule

arXiv:2606.15292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strong light-matter coupling between molecules and optical or plasmonic cavity modes has emerged as a promising platform for advancing photonics, materials science, and chemistry. However, optical cavities and plasmonic resonators in particular are inherently lossy systems characterized by finite photon lifetimes. Accurate theoretical descriptions of molecular dynamics under strong coupling therefore require a proper treatment of cavity losses. In this work, we compare three theoretical approaches for modeling dissipative molecule-cavity dynamics within a realistic parameter regime: the Lindblad master equation, the stochastic Schrödinger equation, and the non-Hermitian Schrödinger equation. As an example, we consider the two lowest energy state of Na2 molecule coupled to a cavity mode and analyze the time evolution of the excited-state population and the mean photon number. Our results demonstrate that the stochastic Schrödinger equation provides an accurate and computationally efficient alternative to the Lindblad master equation, while the non-Hermitian Schrödinger approach is found to be applicable only within a limited range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that inclusion of molecular rotation leads to rotational-vibrational-photonic coupling and gives rise to pronounced nonadiabatic dynamics through light-induced conical intersections. These findings highlight the importance of both dissipation and rotational degrees of freedom for a realistic description of molecular dynamics in strongly coupled molecule-cavity systems.

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

Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

arXiv:2606.20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved. We present CWE-Trace, a framework for LLM vulnerability detection built from 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs. The framework enforces a strict temporal split (pre-2025 historical set / post-cutoff leakage-free set), preserves context-aware vulnerable–patched pairs, and introduces two diagnostic metrics: the Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD). We evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants across non-targeted detection, targeted detection, and CWE classification. Our analysis yields two key results. First, data contamination provides no measurable advantage. Function-level analysis shows that 84% of nominally contaminated samples carry no usable memorization signal: vulnerable functions are absent or cross-mapped across datasets, and ~31% of contaminated samples carry CWE misclassification. Second, backbone directional priors dominate fine-tuning. Models exhibit stable, systematic failure modes (DFI ranging from -85.5 to +94.8 pp) that persist from historical to post-cutoff data and resist correction. Fine-tuning shifts the output threshold without changing the decision policy. This is calibration without comprehension: output distributions adapt to training data while the underlying security reasoning remains absent. The weakest backbone at binary detection (DeepSeek-R1) gains the most in coarse CWE classification, revealing that detection and understanding are decoupled capabilities. The best detection score reaches only 52.1% (+2.1 pp above chance); exact CWE ranking remains below 1.3% Top-1 accuracy, confirming that current LLMs lack reliable security reasoning for systems software, regardless of fine-tuning strategy.