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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Planted-Solution Pauli Hamiltonians as a Quantum Benchmarking Primitive

arXiv:2606.11455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a construction of Pauli Hamiltonians with exactly known ground-state energies, intended as reference instances for ground-state energy estimation algorithms. The construction embeds a planted block-product state as the simultaneous ground state of a sum of frustration-free local clauses on overlapping supports, exposes the resulting model only as a polynomial-size linear combination of Pauli operators, and admits optional Clifford conjugation that preserves the spectrum. The framework subsumes classical planted constraint-satisfaction problems as a diagonal special case, providing a direct embedding channel through which classical hardness properties can be inherited. Open-source software, certification keys, and example instances are made publicly available.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

作者:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

06.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

arXiv:2606.14365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.

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

The Range Shrinks, the Threat Remains: Re-evaluating LLM Package Hallucinations on the 2026 Frontier-Model Cohort

arXiv:2605.17062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spracklen et al. (USENIX Security '25) showed that code-generating large language models hallucinate package names that do not exist on PyPI or npm at rates ranging from 5.2% on commercial models to 21.7% on open-source models, creating an attack surface for slopsquatting – the registration of malicious packages under hallucinated names. We replicate their methodology on five frontier code-capable LLMs released between October 2025 and March 2026: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.2. Across 199,845 paired Python and JavaScript prompts validated against PyPI and npm master lists, we measure overall hallucination rates between 4.62% (Claude Haiku 4.5) and 6.10% (GPT-5.4-mini) – an order-of-magnitude compression of the inter-model spread observed by Spracklen, but not a retirement of the threat. Beyond replication, we identify a set of 127 package names (109 on PyPI, 18 on npm) that all five evaluated models invent identically; following coordinated disclosure with PyPI Security and Socket.dev, 53 of these (41 on PyPI, 12 on npm) remain registrable by an attacker after each registry's existing defenses, constituting a model-agnostic supply-chain attack surface that no single-model study can reveal. We further document a Python-over-JavaScript hallucination asymmetry that inverts Spracklen's 2024 finding, identify a Haiku-below-Sonnet inversion within the Anthropic family, and observe a Jaccard-similarity peak between DeepSeek V3.2 and GPT-5.4-mini (J = 0.343) suggestive of shared training-data origins.

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

SDVDiag: Multimodal Causal Discovery for Online Diagnosis in Software-defined Vehicles

arXiv:2606.15559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The transition toward software-defined vehicles concentrates an increasing share of vehicle functionality into distributed software services, where failures propagate through service dependencies and the surface symptom is often several causal hops away from the underlying defect. Existing approaches to causal root-cause analysis in such systems address this only partially: they typically reason over a single observability modality and operate in an offline, operator-driven mode that does not match the demands of continuous vehicle operation. This paper presents SDVDiag, a multimodal causal-discovery pipeline that fuses log-based and metric-based service representations into a shared embedding space before graph construction, coupled with an anomaly-driven trigger that converts the diagnostic platform from a manually operated batch tool into a continuously running online system. Evaluation on an Autonomous Valet Parking testbed shows that the multimodal pipeline produces sparser causal graphs than a metrics-only baseline (134 vs. 182 edges on average) and consistently outperforms it in edge-weighted reward against an expert knowledge graph at every stage of human-feedback refinement, showing a 2.4-fold improvement over the baseline after 60 feedback queries. An end-to-end fault-injection scenario further demonstrates that the integrated trigger correctly recovers a true root cause located two causal hops upstream of the observable symptom.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

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

From Isolation to Entanglement: When Do Interpretability Methods Identify and Disentangle Known Concepts?

A goal of interpretability is to recover disentangled representations of latent concepts (features) from the activations of neural networks. The quality of features is typically evaluated in isolation, and under implicit independence assumptions that may not hold in practice. Thus, it is unclear to what extent common featurization methods such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and probes disentangle one concept from another. We propose a multi-concept evaluation setting using concepts including sentiment, domain, voice, and tense. We evaluate how well featurizers produce disentangled representations of each concept, observing that features are typically sensitive to only one concept, but also that concepts are distributed across many features. Then, we steer these features, measuring whether each concept is independently manipulable, and whether features interact. Even in idealized settings, steering a feature often affects many concepts, despite a near absence of interaction effects. These results suggest that correlational metrics are insufficient to establish steering selectivity, and that demonstrating that two features operate in separate spaces is insufficient to claim that they will be selective for one concept. These results underscore the importance of multi-concept evaluations in interpretability research.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Method comparisons for differentiation of Schizophrenia and Bipolar based on rs-fMRI Intrinsic and Functional Networks

Psychosis as a symptom manifests in schizophenia and bipolar disorder, two highly heterogeneous psychiatric illnesses with overlapping clinical manifestations. Resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI), represents a promising tool for identifying objective biomarkers of functional brain alterations to aid differential diagnosis. In this work, we comparatively evaluate multiple rs-fMRI representations for differentiating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using intrinsic connectivity network (ICN) temporal profiles and several functional network connectivity (FNC) approaches, including static, dynamic, and high-order connectivity analyses. The study was conducted on a cohort of 371 subjects with psychosis, while evaluation was performed using a separate held-out cohort of 315 subjects. We investigated convolutional neural network architectures applied to ICN temporal profiles, spectrograms, and scalograms, alongside classical machine learning models trained on connectivity-derived features. Across the evaluated approaches, ICN temporal profiles provided the most consistent discriminative performance, with a 1D convolutional neural network achieving the strongest overall results under the benchmark protocol. Among connectivity-based methods, static functional connectivity generally outperformed dynamic and high-order representations, suggesting that increased representational complexity did not necessarily translate into improved generalization. Although the obtained classification performance remained modest, the results highlight the challenges of robust psychosis differentiation using rs-fMRI while emphasizing the relative stability of low-order connectivity representations and temporal ICN features. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts toward reproducible and interpretable neuroimaging biomarkers for psychiatric disorders.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-19

Daily briefing: Human detritus remakes geology

作者:

What, exactly, is a rock? Plus, a stem-cell success for a severe autoimmune disease and evidence that ‘AI deskilling’ is real. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Pretraining A Large Language Model using Distributed GPUs: A Memory-Efficient Decentralized Paradigm

Pretraining large language models (LLMs) typically requires centralized clusters with thousands of high-memory GPUs (e.g., H100/A100). Recent decentralized training methods reduce communication overhead by employing federated optimization; however, they still need to train the entire model on each node, remaining constrained by GPU memory limitations. In this work, we propose SParse Expert Synchronization (SPES), a memory-efficient decentralized framework for pretraining mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs. SPES trains only a subset of experts per node, substantially lowering the memory footprint. Each node updates its local experts and periodically synchronizes with other nodes, eliminating full-parameter transmission while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing. To mitigate limited per-expert data utilization under sparse expert updates, we introduce an expert-merging warm-up strategy, where experts exchange knowledge early in training, to rapidly establish foundational capabilities. With SPES, we train a 2B-parameter MoE LLM using 16 standalone 48GB GPUs over internet connections, which achieves competitive performance with centrally trained LLMs under similar computational budgets. We further demonstrate scalability by training a 7B model from scratch and a 9B model upcycled from a dense checkpoint, both of which match prior centralized baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/SPES.

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

Diagonal-Budgeted Trotterization for Efficient Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation

arXiv:2606.16959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient classical simulation of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is often bottlenecked by exponential state growth and the overhead of generic sparse linear algebra. We introduce diagonal-budgeted Trotterization, a structure-aware strategy that decomposes Hamiltonians into factors preserving diagonal sparsity while tightly controlling fidelity loss. Our implementation, HamSim, utilizes a compact diagonal-sparse data layout and specialized C++/CUDA kernels to bypass the overheads of generic formats like CSR. By leveraging SIMD vectorization, multithreading, and GPU acceleration, HamSim achieves high performance across heterogeneous architectures. Benchmarks on the HamLib suite show that HamSim significantly outperforms Qiskit-Aer. On CPUs, HamSim attains speedups of $182$–$1,269\times$ on optimization instances (TSP, MaxCut) and $4.8$–$841\times$ on physical models (TFIM, Heisenberg). On GPUs, it achieves up to $178\times$ speedup for $12$–$16$ qubit problems. Unlike traditional Trotterization, HamSim maintains near-perfect fidelity without requiring exponential steps. This demonstrates that diagonal-aware numerical kernels provide a scalable foundation for high-fidelity classical Hamiltonian simulation.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

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

Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks

arXiv:2404.01965v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

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

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

Active Inference with a Self-Prior in the Mirror-Mark Task

arXiv:2604.09673v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The mirror self-recognition test evaluates whether a subject touches a mark on its own body that is visible only in a mirror, and is widely used as an indicator of self-awareness. In this study, we present a computational model in which this behavior emerges spontaneously through a single mechanism, the self-prior, without any external reward. The self-prior, implemented with a Transformer, learns the density of familiar multisensory experiences; when a novel mark appears, the discrepancy from this learned distribution drives mark-directed behavior through active inference. A simulated infant, relying solely on vision and proprioception without tactile input, discovered a sticker placed on its own face in the mirror and removed it in approximately 70% of cases without any explicit instruction. Expected free energy decreased significantly after sticker removal, confirming that the self-prior operates as an internal criterion for distinguishing self from non-self. Cross-modal sampling further demonstrated that the self-prior captures visual–proprioceptive associations, functioning as a probabilistic body schema. These results provide a concise computational account of the key behavior observed in the mirror test and suggest that the free energy principle can serve as a unifying hypothesis for investigating the developmental origins of self-awareness. Code is available at: https://github.com/kim135797531/self-prior-mirror

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin disorder competing with positional symmetry breaking governs the metal-insulator behavior in oxide paramagnets

arXiv:2606.14624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Numerous transition-metal oxides have low-temperature antiferromagnetic (AFM) states and high-temperature paramagnetic (PM) phases, where the AFM state is usually insulating while the PM phase can be either insulating or metallic. Without involving strong correlation, we use symmetry-broken density-functional theory (DFT) to obtain the PM phases of insulating NaFeO3 vs the recently discovered metallic NaOsO3. We develop the understanding of insulating and metallic behaviors in paramagnetic oxides by analyzing the interactions between magnetic and positional symmetry breaking: The insulating gap is governed by the competition between the spin disorder that induces a distribution of different magnitudes of local magnetic moments and the polymorphous distribution of off-center atomic displacements. NaFeO3, on the other hand, has large positional displacement with small spin-disorder-induced moments distribution, leading to insulating PM phase, whereas NaOsO3 has a pronounced spin-disorder-induced moments distribution that forces the PM phase to become metallic. Our work identifies this symmetry-breaking competition as a general framework to bridge seemingly disparate metal-insulator behaviors in transition-metal oxides paramagnets without invoking strong correlation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Manifold Bandits: Bayesian Curriculum Learning over the Latent Geometry of Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central approach for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), where training efficiency depends critically on how problems are sampled during optimization. Existing adaptive curriculum learning methods typically prioritize prompts of intermediate difficulty, treating problem selection as a standard bandit problem with independent arms and overlooking the structured, heterogeneous nature of the task space. In this work, we frame problem sampling as a manifold-structured bandit problem with endogenous non-stationarity: problems are related through the model's latent representation space, and sampling decisions can steer how learning signals evolve across that space. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Bayesian Manifold Curriculum (BMC), a structure-aware framework that organizes problems into a hierarchical task tree and applies Bayesian learning to guide sampling. Empirically, we find that different sampling strategies induce non-trivial tradeoffs between productivity (learning signal), diversity (coverage of the task manifold), and utility (evaluation relevance). These results show that prioritizing difficulty alone is insufficient for strong downstream performance, highlighting the importance of incorporating structure and type-awareness into problem sampling.

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

Sentinel: Decoding Context Utilization via Attention Probing for Efficient LLM Context Compression

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often suffers from long and noisy retrieved contexts. Existing context compression methods typically rely on heuristic relevance estimation or supervised compression models rather than on how LLMs utilize retrieved context during inference. We propose Sentinel, a lightweight sentence-level compression framework that decodes inference-time contextual utilization behaviors from head-wise attention patterns of frozen LLMs. To ground supervision in retrieval-dependent answering behavior, Sentinel trains a lightweight probe using QA examples where the model succeeds only when retrieved context is available. Sentinel performs compression using only a single non-autoregressive forward pass without dedicated compression training or autoregressive scoring. Empirically, we find that effective contextual utilization signals remain accessible even in compact proxy models. On LongBench, Sentinel with a 0.5B proxy model achieves up to 5$\times$ compression while attaining question-answering performance competitive with compression methods built on 7B-scale models. Despite being trained only on English QA data, Sentinel also generalizes effectively to Chinese and out-of-domain settings.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Similarity: Temporal Operator Attention for Time Series Analysis

arXiv:2605.11287v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many time-series dynamics are governed by global temporal operators (e.g., filtering and harmonic structure), standard attention forms each output as a convex combination of inputs. This restricts its ability to represent signed and oscillatory transformations that are fundamental to temporal signal processing. We formalize this limitation as a simplex-constrained mixing bottleneck in softmax attention, which becomes especially restrictive for operator-driven time-series tasks. To address this, we propose $Temporal Operator Attention (TOA)$, a framework that augments attention with explicit, learnable sequence-space operators, enabling direct signed mixing across time while preserving input-dependent adaptivity. To make dense $N \times N$ operators practical, we introduce Stochastic Operator Regularization, a high-variance dropout mechanism that stabilizes training and prevents trivial memorization. Across forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification benchmarks, TOA consistently improves performance when integrated into standard backbones such as PatchTST and iTransformer, with particularly strong gains in reconstruction-heavy tasks. These results suggest that explicit operator learning is a key ingredient for effective time-series modeling.