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01.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Observation of quantum vortex core fractionalization and skyrmion formation in a superconductor | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Magnetic fields can penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantum vortices, which consist of a core singularity with circulating currents. London’s quantization implies that there is one core singularity per quantum of magnetic flux in single-component superconductors. Here, we report signatures of quantum vortex core fractionalization on the potassium-terminated surface of a multiband superconductor KFe 2 As 2 . The observed splitting of single integer-flux vortices into several fractional vortices results in a disparity between the numbers of flux quanta and vortex cores. These fractional vortices often arrange in chains, which calculations show are characterized by a ℂP 2 skyrmionic topological invariant; this constitutes a different type of topological defect: the chiral skyrmion. The disparate natures of integer and fractional vortices comprising skyrmions lead to distinct spectroscopic signatures.

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

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.

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

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Inference and Decision Audits for Public Archives of Frontier AI Evaluations

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public AI evaluations are often read as terminal leaderboards, yet the underlying evidence is a selective time series shaped by reporting rules, benchmark revisions, and missingness. Repeated public archives for LiveBench and Open LLM Leaderboard v2 serve as the primary longitudinal record; LMArena provides a preference stress test; and GAIA and tau-bench contribute limited agentic pilots. Together, these archives instantiate a Bayesian inference problem: under a fixed reporting convention, one constructed terminal-only example over $1{,}000$ systems is compatible with two pre-terminal histories, yielding times of $23.03$ or $75.13$ to reach within $0.05$ of the ceiling under the same terminal-tail model. In synthetic posterior comparisons, action-facing diagnostics differ across observation regimes. The candidate selection-aware frontier model fails synthetic recovery, objective-archive prediction, preference transfer, and uncertainty calibration; correspondingly, fixed audit gates reject its stronger claims. An archive-and-adjudication protocol reconstructs public evaluation histories, isolates a verified timing boundary, and falsifies unsupported frontier claims.

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

Dual-Agent Framework for Cross-Model Verified Translation of Natural-Language Protocols into Robotic Laboratory Platform

arXiv:2606.20120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biological experiment protocols are written in natural language, whereas automation systems rely on predefined control commands, creating a semantic gap that limits autonomous execution. Microplate-based automatic experiments are particularly challenging due to the need to simultaneously control well mapping, sample-reagent combinations, replicate placement, and parallel dispensing. This study proposes an agent-based protocol translation framework that converts natural-language microplate-based protocols into executable control commands for a robotic laboratory platform. A Parser Agent formalizes the natural-language protocol into a structured representation, and a rule-based mapping engine deterministically incorporates the operational constraints of the robotic laboratory platform to generate device-level control commands. A heterogeneous LLM Validation Agent verifies completeness, parameter accuracy, and execution order, and triggers a self-correction loop with structured feedback when errors are detected. A sweep involving 7 Parsers and 3 Validators on randomly selected ELISA protocols evaluates how model scale and Validator type affect translation accuracy and pass rates under cross-model verification. The accuracy-latency trade-off is further verified by comparing the rule-based mapping of the proposed framework with LLM end-to-end direct mapping. Finally, Bradford assay-based protein quantification using a microplate was demonstrated on a robotic laboratory platform, validating end-to-end autonomous execution from natural-language protocols to real-world experiments. The proposed framework provides a flexible approach to narrowing the semantic gap between natural-language protocols and microplate-based self-driving laboratories.

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

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HAFMat: Hybrid Priors Guided Adaptive Fusion for Single-Image Human Material Estimation

Physically based rendering (PBR) material estimation is a fundamental appearance decomposition task with broad applications in virtual content creation, relighting, and digital human rendering. However, estimating PBR materials from a single human image remains highly ill-posed, since illumination, geometry, and reflectance are heavily entangled in the observed appearance. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose HAFMat, a hybrid-prior-guided framework for single-image human material estimation. Our method introduces guidance maps that encode complementary cues, including appearance, body geometry, structure, and prior material predictions from pre-trained models. A key observation is that these guidance cues are heterogeneous: some cues mainly provide texture-level constraints, while others convey higher-level semantic information. To exploit this property, we design a Multi-layer Adaptive Feature Fusion Mechanism, which adaptively fuses guidance features with decoder features at different stages. This design enables texture-dominant and semantic-dominant cues to guide material decoding at appropriate levels, leading to more accurate and physically plausible material estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in material estimation and downstream relighting.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

PLaID++: A Preference Aligned Language Model for Targeted Inorganic Materials Design

arXiv:2509.07150v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve correctness in LLMs, however, in many scientific problems, the objective is not necessarily to produce the correct answer, but instead to produce a diverse array of candidates which satisfy a set of constraints. We study this challenge in the context of materials generation. To this end, we introduce PLaID++, an LLM post-trained for stable and property-guided crystal generation. We find that performance hinges on our crystallographic representation and reward formulation. First, we introduce a compact, symmetry-informed Wyckoff text representation which improves computational efficiency and encourages generalization from physical priors. Second, we demonstrate that temperature scaling acts as an entropy regularizer which counteracts mode collapse and encourages exploration. By encoding symmetry constraints directly into text and guiding model outputs towards desirable chemical space, PLaID++ generates structures that are thermodynamically stable, unique, and novel at a $\sim$50\% greater rate than prior methods and conditionally generates structures with desired space group properties. Our work demonstrates the potential of adapting post-training techniques from natural language processing to materials design, paving the way for targeted and efficient discovery of novel materials.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Benign overfitting beyond prediction: The ordinary least squares interpolator

arXiv:2309.15769v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning have highlighted the phenomenon of benign overfitting in overparameterized statistical models, sparking significant interest in understanding its foundations. Owing to its simplicity and practical relevance, the ordinary least squares (OLS) interpolator has become a key object of study for gaining theoretical insight into this phenomenon. While the properties of OLS are well understood in classical underparameterized settings, its behavior in the overparameterized regime – unlike that of ridge regression or the lasso – remains comparatively less explored. We contribute to this growing literature by deriving new algebraic and statistical results for the minimum $\ell_2$-norm OLS interpolator. In contrast to much of the existing work, which focuses on prediction risk, we center our analysis on parameter estimation and inference, which are fundamental for many statistics and causal inference applications. Specifically, we establish overparameterized analogues of (i) the leave-$k$-out formulas, (ii) the omitted variable bias formula, and (iii) the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Under the Gauss-Markov model, we further extend the Gauss-Markov theorem and analyze variance estimation under homoskedasticity in the overparameterized setting. Collectively, these results provide a systematic framework for studying parameter estimation and inference in overparameterized linear models, offering a novel perspective on benign overfitting beyond its implications for prediction.

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

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational costs. We identify two sources of redundancy. First, temporal redundancy: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) applies costly dual forward passes at every timestep, yet guidance matters only at specific steps, and variable scales at critical steps can compensate for skipping others. Second, spatial redundancy: under variable guidance, different transformer blocks exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity, yet uniform calibration across all blocks wastes computation while failing to address their varying requirements. We present RSTR, the first framework to jointly reduce spatiotemporal redundancy in diffusion transformers. Stage-1 addresses temporal redundancy through evolutionary search, discovering sparse guidance schedules with variable scales. Stage-2 addresses spatial redundancy through adaptive rank allocation, assigning calibration capacities to transformer regions based on their sensitivity. Experiments on DiT-XL/2, PixArt-$\alpha$, FLUX, and state-of-the-art Qwen-Image demonstrate 50%-70% compute savings while maintaining or improving quality. On DiT-XL/2, RSTR achieves 57% savings with 15% FID improvement; on Qwen-Image, 3.43$\times$ speedup with preserved quality.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Token Complexity Theory for AI-Augmented Computing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-augmented computing delegates natural language queries, code generation requests, and other open-ended tasks to a cluster of AI models that processes queries and generates responses. This paradigm introduces a resource dimension that neither classical time nor space complexity captures: the cost of sending queries to and receiving responses from such a cluster. We introduce token complexity, a formal resource measure defined as the minimum expected token cost to achieve a specified level of output quality on a task, and develop a taxonomy classifying AI systems by the strength of their probabilistic properties. We develop token complexity within the framework of AI-Oracle Turing machines, in which a probabilistic Turing machine interacts with a stochastic oracle via dedicated query and response tapes. We prove basic theorems establishing that token complexity behaves as expected: monotonicity (higher quality costs more tokens), convexity (quality improvements become progressively more expensive), price sensitivity (small price changes produce bounded cost changes), and price-relativity of task ordering (the token complexity ordering of tasks can reverse depending on the query-to-response cost ratio). We prove that the complexity frontier, defined as the set of all feasible resource bounds in tokens, time, and space, is non-empty, upward-closed, and convex.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

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

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

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

Long-Context Modeling via GSS-Transformer Hybrid Architecture with Learnable Mixing

Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Transformer architectures achieve strong performance via self-attention but scale quadratically ($O(N^2)$) with sequence length, while State Space Models (SSMs) scale linearly ($O(N)$) but suffer from a selective recall bottleneck, struggling to retrieve precise information from compressed states. This creates a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency and perplexity. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Parallel Hybrid Architecture (PHA), which runs Gated State Spaces (GSS), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) as independent parallel branches fused by a learnable mixing mechanism. Instead of forcing SSMs to approximate attention or serializing the two paradigms, PHA allows each branch to specialize: GSS captures global context, while attention performs selective retrieval, with FFN providing complementary processing. On WikiText-103, PHA achieves 16.51 PPL at 125M parameters, outperforming Hedgehog (16.70) and H3-125M (23.70). Scaling to 180M parameters yields 16.42 PPL, which gives comparable results with the pure attention baseline while delivering 24\% higher throughput and up to 40\% lower memory usage at long contexts. On OpenWebText, our 125M model achieves 19.72 PPL, outperforming standard Transformers (20.60) and GSS hybrid baselines (19.80). These results demonstrate that separating sequence modeling paradigms into parallel specialists enables Transformer-level perplexity with substantially improved efficiency for long-context language modeling.

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

PACE-RAG: Patient-Aware Contextual and Evidence-Constrained RAG for Clinical Drug Recommendation

Drug recommendation requires a deep understanding of individual patient context, especially for complex conditions like Parkinson's disease. While LLMs possess broad medical knowledge, they fail to capture the subtle nuances of actual prescribing patterns. Existing RAG methods also struggle with these complexities because guideline-based retrieval remains too generic and similar-patient retrieval often replicates majority patterns without accounting for the unique clinical nuances of individual patients. To bridge this gap, we propose PACE-RAG (Patient-Aware Contextual and Evidence-Constrained RAG). Rather than directly copying frequent medications from retrieved patients, PACE-RAG personalizes recommendations by first extracting patient-specific clinical features, retrieving cases around these features, and then refining the final prescription using the patient's current symptoms, active medication history, and focus-specific prescribing tendencies. By analyzing treatment patterns tailored to specific clinical features, PACE-RAG generates patient-specific medication recommendations along with an explainable clinical summary. Evaluated on a Parkinson's cohort and the MIMIC-IV benchmark using Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen3-8B, PACE-RAG achieved state-of-the-art performance, reaching F1 scores of 80.84% and 47.22%, respectively. These results suggest that PACE-RAG is a robust and clinically grounded framework for personalized decision support. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ChaeYoungHuh/PACE-RAG.

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

Accidental Symmetry in the Tavis-Cummings Model via the Schwinger Boson Representation

arXiv:2606.12813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) Hamiltonian is a paradigmatic model of light-matter interaction and, more generally, qubit-boson interactions, widely used across atomic, optical, and superconducting qubit platforms. In the multi-qubit setting, where n qubits are identically coupled to a single boson mode, this interaction is known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) Hamiltonian. The structure of the TC model is usually understood in terms of two standard symmetries: permutation invariance of the qubits and a U(1) symmetry associated with conservation of the total excitation number. Here we identify an additional, independent "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian and construct the corresponding conserved observable. We show that, for n>2 qubits, this symmetry imposes strong constraints on the realizable unitary transformations. These constraints persist in the presence of the global $J_z$ Hamiltonian, but are removed by adding $J_z^2$, even though $J_z^2$ preserves both permutation invariance and the U(1) symmetry. Finally, we explain the origin of this previously unnoticed symmetry using Schwinger's boson representation of angular momentum. These restrictions have important implications for controllability of the TC system and for its applications to quantum computing, which are investigated further in a companion paper.

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

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

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

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Discrete Autoregressive Transformer for Generative Mechanism Synthesis

arXiv:2606.17409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Planar path synthesis requires mechanisms whose coupler curves match a prescribed trajectory; the mapping from curve to linkage is inherently one-to-many across four-, six-, and eight-bar topologies. We address this design problem with simulation-grounded evaluation on a curated corpus of over one million mechanisms, reporting Chamfer distance and dynamic time warping after forward kinematics and geometric alignment. We formulate synthesis as conditional autoregressive sequence modeling: joint coordinates are uniformly quantized to tokens and generated by a decoder-only transformer with a variational-autoencoder (VAE) latent of the target curve and an explicit mechanism-type token. Training combines token cross-entropy with a Gaussian-smoothed bin auxiliary loss that respects ordinal structure among bins. At inference, a bounded latent-noise schedule decodes all mechanism types at each noise level; we retain the top five candidates by geometric error, yielding diverse accurate families without dataset lookup. On held-out tests, aggregate mean Chamfer distance is $0.0132$ and mean dynamic time warping is $0.153$; a latent $k$-nearest-neighbor baseline that conditions on training-set neighbor latents in VAE space achieves matched-topology mean Chamfer distance $0.0071$ and mean dynamic time warping $0.117$ using the same decoder.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

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

KCSAT-ML: Probing Reasoning Models with Nationwide-Cohort Human Difficulty

Math reasoning benchmarks have proliferated, yet most lack a per-item difficulty signal grounded in actual human performance. We introduce KCSAT-ML, a decade (2014-2025) of Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT; Suneung) mathematics: 664 problems with a 339-item core set carrying official per-item error rates from nationwide cohorts of hundreds of thousands of examinees. We pair the benchmark with Difficulty-aligned Reasoning Gain (DRG): a score-orthogonal metric that asks whether a model's mistakes concentrate on the items humans found hard, or on items humans found easy. Together they expose, across a wide range of VLMs (and LLMs via OCR), three patterns: (i) low-budget accuracy collapses on the high-human-error tail at every model size; (ii) test-time scaling (TTS) raises token use roughly linearly with cohort error rate, while accuracy gains follow a non-monotonic curve; (iii) within a single family, TTS flips between anti-scaling on the hardest items and overthinking on easier ones – two faces of the same alignment failure. On DRG, models with near-identical accuracy can sit at near-opposite values: one model gets wrong what humans also find hard, while another solves the hardest items yet fails on items humans find easy – a contrast that aggregate accuracy hides. Our code and dataset builder will be open-sourced at https://github.com/naver-ai/KCSAT-ML.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An Introduction to the Foundations and Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2603.09818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article surveys a selection of key conceptual and interpretational developments in quantum mechanics, tracing the theory from its foundational postulates to contemporary discussions of measurement, nonlocality, and the emergence of classicality. Beginning with the structure of Hilbert space and the postulates governing state evolution and measurement, the epistemic stance of the Copenhagen interpretation and its modern reformulations are examined. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, Bell's theorem, and Hardy's paradox are then discussed as probes of locality and realism, alongside the deterministic but explicitly nonlocal de Broglie-Bohm theory. The measurement problem and the implications of contextuality are analyzed in relation to objective collapse models, which introduce new physical dynamics to account for definite outcomes. Finally, the role of decoherence in the suppression of interference and the emergence of classical behavior is explored, together with the interpretational frameworks of many-worlds and consistent histories. This material aims to provide a coherent introductory overview of how several of the most prominent interpretations address the central concern of what quantum mechanics tells us about the nature of physical reality.