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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

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

Rescaling Confidence: What Scale Design Reveals About LLM Metacognition

arXiv:2603.09309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0–100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is not neutral. Across six LLMs and three datasets, verbalized confidence is heavily discretized, with more than 78\% of responses concentrating on just three round-number values. To investigate this phenomenon, we systematically manipulate confidence scales along three dimensions: granularity, boundary placement, and range regularity, and evaluate metacognitive sensitivity using $meta-d'$. We find that a 0–20 scale consistently improves metacognitive efficiency over the standard 0–100 format, while boundary compression degrades performance and round-number preferences persist even under irregular ranges. These results demonstrate that confidence scale design directly affects the quality of verbalized uncertainty and should be treated as a first-class experimental variable in LLM evaluation.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Characterizing Admissible Objective Functions for Hierarchical Clustering

arXiv:2604.23628v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, but classical methods have long lacked a principled objective function. Dasgupta [STOC~2016] took an important step toward addressing this gap by proposing a well-motivated objective function for cluster trees. Cohen-Addad et al. [J. ACM 2019] subsequently introduced the notion of admissibility: an objective function is admissible if, whenever the input similarity matrix admits generating trees, its minimizers are precisely those generating trees.They also gave a necessary and sufficient condition for admissibility within a family of objective functions based on aggregate intercluster similarity. We refer to this family as sum-type objective functions. However, apart from Dasgupta's original objective function, no explicit admissible objective functions in this family were provided. In this paper, we study admissible objective functions for hierarchical clustering in two directions. For sum-type objective functions, we give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two, and we derive sufficient conditions for degree-three polynomials. We also show that the recursive sparsest cut algorithm achieves an O$(\phi)$-approximation ratio for the admissible objective functions covered by our characterization, where $\phi$ is the approximation factor of the sparsest cut subroutine. We then introduce max-type objective functions, where cluster interaction is measured by maximum, rather than aggregate, intercluster similarity. For this class, we characterize which objective functions are admissible for arbitrary symmetric scaling functions and give a complete characterization when the scaling function is a symmetric polynomial of degree at most two.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Approximability limits for bounded-degree max-LINSAT and implications for decoded quantum interferometry

arXiv:2606.13570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For general max-k-XORSAT with $k \geq 3$, no polynomial-time algorithm can do substantially better than random guessing on worst-case instances unless $\mathsf{P} = \mathsf{NP}$: approximating beyond the random-assignment value of $1/2$ is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard. The picture changes when each variable appears in at most $D$ constraints. In that bounded-degree setting, polynomial-time algorithms can provably beat the random baseline by an additive amount of order $1/\sqrt{D}$. For Boolean instances, this scaling is known to be optimal: the matching hardness result is due to Trevisan, while the corresponding algorithmic guarantee was established by Barak et al. Whether the same holds over general finite fields, and what it implies for quantum algorithms, has not been established. We make this connection explicit and extend the hardness to max-E$k$-LINSAT$(q,r)$ with bounded degree $D$ and over arbitrary finite fields $\mathbb{F}_q$, proving that it is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard to exceed $r/q + \mathcal{O}_{q,r}(1/\sqrt{D})$. These results provide the complexity-theoretic benchmark for the bounded-degree instances targeted by decoded quantum interferometry (DQI), QAOA, and classical heuristics. Any quantum advantage on bounded-degree instances is therefore confined to the constant prefactor. We further show that in the context of DQI and on $(k,D)$-regular instances, this prefactor is sensitive to the nature of the decoder: DQI with classical decoders faces an information-theoretic $1/\sqrt{D \log D}$ barrier that prevents it from matching the hardness scaling, while DQI with quantum decoders is compatible with the $1/\sqrt{D}$ scaling – identifying quantum decoding as the key ingredient for matching the complexity-theoretic scaling with DQI.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation

We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliable, semantically aligned interaction with external data services. The modular framework is portable across platforms through API schema substitution and supports applications in environmental monitoring, disaster response, and climate analysis. It establishes a scalable interface between user intent and geospatial infrastructure, enabling streamlined and automated Earth observation workflows. Preliminary experiments under adversarial multi-turn settings show that prompt-level safety instructions improve robustness, although rare high-impact failures persist in API manipulation scenarios and highlight the need for adaptive, system-level defenses that balance safety, usability, and cost efficiency, which motivates the use of our intercept-level Guardrail agent.

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

Effective Gaussian Management for High-fidelity Object Reconstruction

This paper proposes an effective Gaussian management framework for high-fidelity scene reconstruction of both appearance and geometry. Unlike recent Gaussian Splatting (GS) pipelines that treat all primitives uniformly during optimization, our framework explicitly manages the attribute activation, representation and pruning of Gaussian. Specifically, our framework first introduces GauSep, a novel densification strategy that selectively activates Gaussian color or normal attributes to alleviate destructive gradient conflicts arising from dual supervision. We further propose GauRep, an adaptive Gaussian representation that dynamically adjusts spherical harmonics (SHs) orders and performs task-decoupled pruning to reduce redundancy at both the individual and global levels. To provide reliable geometric supervision for above mangement process, we additionally introduce CoRe, an regularized surface reconstruction module that distills robust normal fields from an SDF branch to the Gaussian representation through a confidence mechanism. Notably, the proposed Gaussian management is compatible with various reconstruction architectures and can be seamlessly integrated to improve performance while reducing size of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior or comparable performance in appearance and geometry reconstruction compared with state-of-the-art methods, while using significantly fewer parameters.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

ReSeT: a taxonomy-aware reference genome selection tool

Motivation: Reference genome composition determines which taxa a profiling pipeline can detect and distinguish, and becomes of critical importance for high-resolution profiling where taxonomic boundaries begin to blur. Existing selection tools optimize within-taxon representativeness but disregard discrimination across taxa, leaving open whether explicitly accounting for inter-taxon discrimination during selection improves profiling. Results: Here we present ReSeT, a facility-location-based reference genome selection tool that operates on arbitrary pairwise distance matrices, extended with a tunable inter-taxon discrimination term and per-genome selection cost, and solved by local search. We benchmark ReSeT against established selection methods on three viral datasets spanning varying degrees of taxonomic ambiguity. On the high-ambiguity SARS-CoV-2 datasets, appropriately tuned ReSeT selections matched or exceeded the strongest alternatives in terms of profiling accuracy, whereas on the low ambiguity IAV dataset VSEARCH remained dominant. Interestingly, we find that the novel inter-taxon discrimination term contributed weakly, indicating that ReSeT's facility-location formulation and selection cost drives ReSeT's performance. We further propose a novel taxonomic ambiguity index, computable from ReSeT's inputs, that summarizes the taxonomic ambiguity of reference genomes and aligns with where ReSeT improves over existing selection methods. Availability and implementation: ReSeT is implemented in Python ([≥]3.10) and is freely available under the MIT license. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/JaspervB-tud/ReSeT and ReSeT can also be installed directly from the Python Package Index (PyPI) via pip install reset-bio.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tripartite entanglement of remote atomic qubits

arXiv:2606.17173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed entanglement across multi-node quantum networks is essential for a wide range of quantum technologies, including modular quantum computers, distributed sensing and metrology, and multi-party secure communication protocols. Such large-scale quantum networks will require photonic interconnects to generate and sustain entangled states across localized nodes. Previously, three-node distributed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states have been generated between solid-state qubits and atomic ensembles, but not yet in the platform of individual atomic qubits, which can be replicated, detected, and individually controlled with high fidelity. Here we report the first fully-distributed GHZ state of qubits across a three-node quantum network of single atomic memories, using photonic interconnects. We achieve a bounded fidelity of $0.841(17) \leq \mathcal{F} \leq 0.881(17)$ at an entanglement generation rate of 0.095(5)/sec and measure a clear violation of Mermin's inequality while closing the detection loophole for the first time in a fully-distributed multipartite entangled state.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep Learning-Driven Inverse Design of Doherty Power Amplifiers Using Pixelated Combiners and Dual-State Impedance Synthesis

arXiv:2606.18395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The output combiner of a Doherty power amplifier (PA) integrates load modulation, impedance matching, and phase compensation within a single network, making its design and synthesis highly challenging. In this paper, we propose a three-port Doherty combiner design methodology that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), pixelated layout representations, and genetic algorithms (GA) with dual-state impedance synthesis to address both peak and back-off power conditions. As a proof of concept, two GaN HEMT Doherty PA prototypes incorporating three-port pixelated combiners are designed and fabricated. Both prototypes achieve a measured saturated output power exceeding 44.2 dBm with peak drain efficiency above 71.2% within 2.6-2.8 GHz. Furthermore, a drain efficiency as high as 64% is measured at the 6-dB back-off level. After applying digital predistortion, each prototype achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -51.3 dBc.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

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

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs. Many multimodal tasks, especially those involving complex spatial compositions, multiple interacting objects, or evolving instructions, require decomposing instructions, verifying intermediate results, and making iterative corrections. While test-time scaling (TTS) has demonstrated that allocating additional inference compute for iterative reasoning substantially improves language model performance, extending this paradigm to unified multimodal models remains an open challenge. We introduce UniT, a framework for multimodal chain-of-thought test-time scaling that enables a single unified model to reason, verify, and refine across multiple rounds. UniT combines agentic data synthesis, unified model training, and flexible test-time inference to elicit cognitive behaviors including verification, subgoal decomposition, and content memory. Our key findings are: (1) unified models trained on short reasoning trajectories generalize to longer inference chains at test time; (2) sequential chain-of-thought reasoning provides a more scalable and compute-efficient TTS strategy than parallel sampling; (3) training on generation and editing trajectories improves out-of-distribution visual reasoning. These results establish multimodal test-time scaling as an effective paradigm for advancing both generation and understanding in unified models.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evidence of Layered Positional and Directional Constraints in the Voynich Manuscript: Implications for Cipher-Like Structure

The Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits a script of uncertain origin whose grapheme sequences have resisted linguistic analysis. We present a systematic analysis of its grapheme sequences, revealing two complementary structural layers: a character-level right-to-left optimization in word-internal sequences and a left-to-right dependency at word boundaries, a directional dissociation not observed in any of our four comparison languages (English, French, Hebrew, Arabic). We further evaluate two classes of structured generator against a four-signature joint criterion: a parametric slot-based generator and a Cardan grille implementing Rugg's (2004) gibberish hypothesis. Across their full tested parameter spaces, neither class reproduces all four signatures simultaneously. While these results do not rule out generator classes we have not tested, they provide the first quantitative benchmarks against which any future generative or cryptanalytic model of the VMS can be evaluated, and they suggest that the VMS exhibits cipher-like structural constraints that are difficult to reproduce from simple positional or frequency-based mechanisms alone.

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

Revisiting Neural Processes via Fourier Transform and Volterra Series

arXiv:2606.01172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modeling unknown latent functions from finite, irregularly sampled measurements is a recurring challenge across science and engineering. Neural processes (NPs), a family of probabilistic functional models, are promising solutions – especially when endowed with domain-specific symmetries like translation equivariance, which improve sample efficiency and generalization. Yet existing translation-equivariant NPs face two limitations: (i) they stack generic components with non-linearities, obscuring the induced function class and limiting interpretability; and (ii) convolutional designs rely on kernels with local receptive fields and require dense uniform input grids, while attention-based methods avoid these issues but scale quadratically with the number of observations. We address both with two contributions. First, using the Volterra expansion, we characterize continuous translation-equivariant operators as sums of higher-order convolutions, yielding analytical transparency while admitting efficient approximation by first-order convolutions. Second, we introduce set Fourier convolutions (SFConvs), a frequency-domain parameterization that operates directly on irregularly sampled points, achieves approximately global receptive fields, and scales linearly in the number of observations. Building on these ideas, we propose two conditional NPs (CNPs): SFConvCNPs, which stack SFConv blocks with non-linearities, and SFVConvCNPs, which integrate the Volterra formulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our methods' efficacy against state-of-the-art baselines.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

BindEdit: Taming Attention Leakage for Precise Multi-Object Image Editing

Real image editing enables precise manipulation of visual content, yet existing methods often fail in complex multi-object scenarios, causing semantic blending, object duplication, or incomplete edits. We attribute these failures to attention leakage, where signals across spatial regions and text tokens become entangled during the denoising process. Specifically, we identify two distinct forms of leakage: Edit-Token Leakage, where ambiguous token-region alignment leads to object blending, and Source Dominance Leakage, where tokens of unchanged source objects overwhelm the attention intended for target entities. To resolve these leakages, we propose BindEdit, which enforces attention-level constraints within a single diffusion trajectory. To suppress Edit-Token Leakage, BindEdit jointly regularizes cross- and self-attention so that each target token group is bound to its corresponding spatial region while maintaining instance-level separation. To suppress Source Dominance Leakage, a cross-attention re-balancing mechanism amplifies target token influence and attenuates residual source semantics within editable regions. Moreover, a region fidelity term ensures that each target concept is expressed coherently across the entire editing mask. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive multi-object benchmark encompassing diverse object counts and categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BindEdit consistently outperforms existing methods within a single diffusion trajectory, maintaining robust performance across both single- and multi-object editing scenarios.

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

LLMCodec: Adapting Video Codecs for Efficient Weight Compression of Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models(LLMs) has led to remarkable advances in natural language processing. However, the increasing scale of these models introduces substantial challenges in terms of storage, transmission, and deployment. Though great efforts have been devoted to model compression and quantization, existing methods often rely on fine-tuning or calibration data, which exhibit limited generalization across different tensor types. In this paper, we argue that video codecs offer a promising solution for LLM compression, due to their inherent compatibility with matrix structured data, configurable compression strategies, and the availability of highly optimized, off-the-shelf implementations. Therefore, we present LLMCodec, a video codec-based LLM compression method that integrates affine quantization with the recent VVC/H.266 video codec. Beyond VVC, we further compare a range of video codecs and encoding profiles to evaluate their impact on compression performance. Experiments on different models demonstrate the robustness and generality of LLMCodec. Notably, on LLaMA-3-8B at 2-bit precision, LLMCodec reduces perplexity by over 1.5x and improves downstream task accuracy by 21% compared with the existing method.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GraphBEV++: Multi-Modal Feature Alignment for Autonomous Driving

Feature misalignment in BEV perception is a critical yet often overlooked challenge in autonomous driving, especially under calibration uncertainties between LiDAR and camera sensors. To address this issue, we propose a robust multi-modal fusion framework, GraphBEV++, which systematically mitigates projection-induced misalignment. The framework consists of two key modules: LocalAlign-v2 and GlobalAlign-v2. LocalAlign-v2 introduces neighborhood-aware depth features via graph matching to correct local misalignment. It supports both LSS-based and query-based BEV representations, making it compatible with BEVFusion and BEVFormer architectures for consistent cross-paradigm alignment. GlobalAlign-v2 encompasses two variants: Deformable and Diffusion. The Deformable variant addresses global misalignment in LSS-based multi-modal BEV by explicitly learning cross-modal feature offsets. In contrast, the Diffusion variant targets implicit misalignment in query-based BEV by injecting noise to simulate misalignment and employing a denoising process to recover aligned features. Experimental results show that GraphBEV++ achieves state-of-the-art performance under misalignment noise on nuScenes and Waymo subset, improves long-range detection on Argoverse2, and generalizes effectively to the 3D occupancy prediction task, consistently improving occupancy estimation accuracy and robustness under both clean and noisy settings. Furthermore, GraphBEV++ effectively alleviates misalignment issues in end-to-end autonomous driving. Compared with five baselines (UniAD, VAD, FusionAD, MomAD, and WoTE), it demonstrates superior performance in both open-loop (nuScenes) and closed-loop (Bench2Drive and NAVSIM) evaluations across perception, prediction, and planning tasks.

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

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

A Two-Stage Statistical Framework for Evaluating Associative Interference in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.14117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for bias using adaptations of human psychological paradigms, yet methodological limitations-particularly the conflation of refusal behavior with task performance-have hindered clear interpretation. Here, we adapt the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a controlled, forced-choice framework and introduce a two-stage modeling approach that separates response compliance from task-consistent classification. Across three contemporary LLMs (Claude Sonnet-4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-5), we evaluate associative interference, defined as reduced task-consistency in incongruent relative to congruent conditions. While compliance with the structured response format was uniformly high, interference effects varied substantially across models and domains. Claude Sonnet-4 exhibited strong interference in the Gender–Career domain (DeltaP = 0.086, 95% CrI [0.026, 0.173]) and smaller but credible effects in Gender–Science. Gemini 2.5 Pro showed attenuated interference, and GPT-5 exhibited minimal or no detectable interference across domains. These findings demonstrate that IAT-style associative asymmetries are not a universal property of LLMs, but instead depend on model-specific characteristics. By isolating interference from compliance and modeling item-level variability, this study provides a principled framework for evaluating structured response patterns in LLMs. The results highlight the importance of model-specific assessment and suggest that associative interference can be substantially mitigated in modern systems.

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

Parallelizing Tool Execution and LLM Generation for Low-Latency Agent Serving

arXiv:2603.18897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-powered agents execute tasks through a sequential loop of model generation and tool execution. Today's serving systems serialize this loop, leaving tool latency exposed on the task critical path. This paper presents PASTE, a tool-aware agent-serving system that predicts concrete future tool invocations from recurring agent patterns and executes them speculatively while the LLM is still generating. PASTE isolates speculative results until confirmed by the LLM and jointly schedules tool execution and returning LLM sessions to avoid shifting bottlenecks to the GPU. Across deep research, coding, and scientific-agent workloads, PASTE reduces average task completion time by 43.5% and lowers observed tool latency by 1.8x.

22.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

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

作者: 未知作者

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.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >