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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

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

DragMesh-2: Physically Plausible Dexterous Hand-Object Interaction with Articulated Objects

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand–handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand–object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Emergent decadal predictability in Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise

Despite large uncertainties associated with future mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, ice-sheet models show that the rate of sea-level rise from Antarctic ice loss in 2025 is strongly predictive of the rate for the next several decades, regardless of emission pathway or model complexity. This finding is robust across all models that were considered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report global mean sea-level projections, including the low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios of sea-level rise. Given this strong near-term decadal predictability, ice-sheet models that can accurately reproduce present-day ice-mass loss provide a reliable basis for near-term sea-level planning and adaptation through to mid-century. The predictability breaks down by the end of the twenty-first century as feedbacks, such as those related to marine ice-sheet retreat, begin to emerge, leading to accelerating ice loss. Drawing on these results, we identify key feedback mechanisms that can account for the transition between near-term decadal predictability and the longer-term, feedback-driven evolution, and suggest priorities for ice-sheet model development aimed at resolving long-term sea-level rise uncertainty. Although Antarctic ice loss projections diverge widely by 2100, this Perspective shows that present-day rates robustly predict mid-century sea level rise, providing a firm basis for near-term planning, while highlighting priorities for model development aimed at resolving longer-term sea level rise uncertainty.

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

IMPACTeen: Intentions, Manipulation, Persuasion, Annotations, and Consequences in Teen Communication Dataset

IMPACTeen is a dataset of textual social influence scenarios spanning interpersonal, media-based, and digital settings in an adolescent context. It contains 1,021 texts, 5,100 individual annotation records, and gold labels for social influence techniques, with each text annotated from five distinct perspectives: teenagers, parents, psychologists, communication experts, and teachers. The resource was constructed through constrained LLM generation, followed by a two-step human editing and validation phase aimed at ensuring youth-context realism. A multi-dimensional annotation covered influence presence, techniques, intentions, consequences, resistance, reactions, and annotation confidence. The dataset supports research on social influence detection, annotator disagreement, cross-lingual modeling, and the training and evaluation of language models. The dataset was created in Polish and is accompanied by a corresponding English version.

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

A deep learning framework for jointly solving transient Fokker-Planck equations with arbitrary parameters and initial distributions

arXiv:2604.06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE) is central to analyzing complex parameterized stochastic systems. However, current numerical methods lack parallel computation capabilities across varying conditions, severely limiting comprehensive parameter exploration and transient analysis. This paper introduces a deep learning-based pseudo-analytical probability solution (PAPS) that, via a single training process, simultaneously resolves transient FPE solutions for arbitrary multi-modal initial distributions, system parameters, and time points. The core idea is to unify initial, transient, and stationary distributions via Gaussian mixture distributions (GMDs) and develop a constraint-preserving autoencoder that bijectively maps constrained GMD parameters to unconstrained, low-dimensional latent representations. In this representation space, the panoramic transient dynamics across varying initial conditions and system parameters can be modeled by a single evolution network. Extensive experiments on paradigmatic systems demonstrate that the proposed PAPS maintains high accuracy while achieving inference speeds four orders of magnitude faster than GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulations. This efficiency leap enables previously intractable real-time parameter sweeps and systematic investigations of stochastic bifurcations. By decoupling representation learning from physics-informed transient dynamics, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for probabilistic modeling of multi-dimensional, parameterized stochastic systems.

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

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

What Semantics Survive the Connector? Diagnosing VLM-to-DiT Alignment in Video Editing

Flow matching based video generative models have been increasingly relying on prepended Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to handle complex, instruction-based video editing. The prevailing assumption underlying this paradigm is that a connector module can seamlessly align the VLM's rich multi-modal reasoning with the original text embedding space of DiTs. However, we hypothesize that this alignment acts as a severe semantic bottleneck, degrading fine-grained structural variables. Verifying this is challenging, as end-to-end evaluations conflate alignment failures with generation errors, and natural datasets lack disentangled annotations. To rigorously investigate this, we propose a controlled data processing pipeline based on video composition that results in TRACE-Edit, a diagnostic dataset focusing on relation-based editing. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a comprehensive diagnostic protocol to analyze two important designs of meta-query and connector in the existing video editing models. Systematic evaluation of four representative model cases reveals that fine-grained structural semantics can be severely degraded during alignment. Our findings overturn the assumption of lossless semantic transfer, identifying the VLM-to-DiT alignment as a major bottleneck and providing a new diagnostic foundation for future multi-modal alignment architectures.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

作者:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

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

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

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

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

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

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Upper Lower Value Envelopes to Shape Online RL: A Principled Approach

arXiv:2510.19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes within this context. To this end, we introduce a principled two-stage framework: the first stage uses offline data to derive upper and lower bounds on value functions, while the second incorporates these learned bounds into online algorithms. Our method extends prior work by decoupling the upper and lower bounds, enabling more flexible and tighter approximations. In contrast to approaches that rely on fixed shaping functions, our envelopes are data-driven and explicitly modeled as random variables, with a filtration argument ensuring independence across phases. The analysis establishes high-probability regret bounds determined by two interpretable quantities, thereby providing a formal bridge between offline pre-training and online fine-tuning. Empirical results on tabular MDPs demonstrate substantial regret reductions compared with both UCBVI and prior methods while remaining competitive with related approaches.

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

Optimizing Encoder Circuits of Entanglement-Assisted Quantum LDPC Codes via Beam Search

arXiv:2606.11468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement-assisted (EA) quantum QC-LDPC codes offer strong error-correction capabilities with structured parity-check matrices, but their practical use depends on efficient encoder circuits and the availability of pre-shared Bell pairs (ebits). In all encoder implementations based on the stabilizer formalism, the dominant contribution to this complexity comes from the use of controlled gates. In this paper, we adopt the Sharma-Kumar-Garani (SKG) encoder construction. We formulate the encoder optimization as a search over GF(2) row operations that decompose the binary matrix derived from its CNOT sub-sequence. We solve this problem using a beam search algorithm guided by a Hamming-distance heuristic. For the tested EA quantum QC-LDPC code families, the proposed method achieves CNOT-count reductions of 7.3-34.0% relative to the SKG baseline encoder. The optimized circuits also yield lower CNOT counts than Patel-Markov-Hayes synthesis on all tested instances and are verified by stabilizer-tableau simulation. These results show that substantial encoder simplification is possible for structured EA QC-LDPC codes.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Phi-Actor-Critic: Steering General-Sum Games to Pareto-Efficient Correlated Equilibria

arXiv:2606.11284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world multi-agent systems, from traffic coordination to resource allocation, are often modeled as general-sum games where individual incentives conflict with collective welfare. In these settings, the central challenge is not merely finding an equilibrium, but selecting socially desirable outcomes among many suboptimal Nash equilibria. Standard deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods struggle with this problem, as value-decomposition approaches are constrained by monotonicity assumptions and policy-gradient methods often converge to stable but socially inefficient equilibria. To address this limitation, we propose $\Phi$-Actor-Critic ($\Phi$-AC), a framework that leverages swap regret minimization to steer learning toward high-welfare correlated equilibria (CE). To make counterfactual regret estimation tractable in deep MARL, $\Phi$-AC employs a centralized attention critic that predicts vector-valued regrets in a single forward pass, avoiding computationally expensive counterfactual simulations. We further introduce a Lagrangian-based equilibrium selection mechanism that optimizes social welfare while enforcing stability through regret constraints. Experiments on matrix games, Multi-Agent Particle Environments (MPE), and the Melting Pot Harvest scenario demonstrate that $\Phi$-AC learns efficient and stable coordination strategies across diverse mixed-motive settings while maintaining high collective return and competitive fairness.

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

From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails

arXiv:2606.14517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based guardrails have emerged as a highly effective defense against prompt injection and jailbreak attacks in autonomous agents. However, we reveal that the very reasoning and task-following capabilities enabling this protection introduce a novel vulnerability: attackers can inject crafted data to trap the guardrail in extended reasoning loops, effectuating a systematic denial-of-service (DoS) attack. To systematically expose this threat, we design a beam-search optimization framework that crafts natural-language payloads to maximize guardrail reasoning length, utilizing an LLM proposer guided by a strategy bank. Based on the observation of guardrail's schema-following nature, we also provide another attack framework driven by mechanism-aware structural mutations with less computational load. The attack efficacy is systematically evaluated in two parts. First, in standalone evaluations, the attack generalizes across diverse guardrail architectures, safety templates, and agent benchmarks. Payloads optimized on a single open-source surrogate successfully transfer to eight leading model backbones (e.g., Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Qwen), achieving a 13–63$\times$ token amplification. Second, in end-to-end real-world agent deployments (web, desktop, code, and multi-agent systems), the attack reveals up to a 148$\times$ latency amplification. We show that a single poisoned document can saturate shared guardrail infrastructures, effectively starving co-located agents and paralyzing the entire system. By uncovering this availability flaw, our work underscores the urgent need to develop cost-bounded, reasoning-robust guardrails.

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

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

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

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The popularization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has increased exploration of the demographic biases related to race, age, gender, and accent, often formed from imbalanced training data. Most of these studies focused on standard grapheme-based ASR systems with comparatively little emphasis on phoneme-based systems, such as models that produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representations. As ASR systems shift toward multilingual support and low-resource language modeling, IPA-based layers serve as a critical, language-agnostic foundation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art open-source ASR systems, WhisperIPA and ZIPA, that generate IPA transcriptions across diverse accents and language sources. Our evaluation includes existing multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English-language corpora. We measure model performance by comparing model-generated IPA transcriptions against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems using both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a proposed Soft PER metric that tolerates linguistically similar phoneme substitutions. Our analysis examines how performance varies across languages and demographic groups such as gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, revealing persistent disparities even after accounting for acceptable phonemic variation. These findings provide insight into potential sources of bias and inform the development of more inclusive and linguistically robust phoneme-based ASR systems. Our code and data will be made publicly available to the community.

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

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

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

When Plausible Is Not Realistic: Evaluating Human Mobility in LLM-Based Urban Simulation

LLM-based generative agents are increasingly used in urban simulators, yet it remains unclear whether they reproduce empirically realistic human mobility patterns or merely generate plausible mobility narratives. We introduce a validation framework for evaluating the mobility of generative agents of LLM-based urban simulators against real-world mobility data. For this, we use mobility laws, temporal rhythms, network motifs, semantic activity transitions, and behavioral mobility profiles. Using datasets from the Greater Paris region and Shanghai, we evaluate AgentSociety and CitySim across multiple dimensions of mobility realism. Our analysis reveals a substantial gap between narrative plausibility and empirical mobility realism. Although the simulators capture some high-level semantic activity distributions, they struggle to reproduce core spatial and temporal constraints, including realistic trip-length distributions, origin-destination flows, dwell times, and transition dynamics. We further observe that realistic mobility diversity is unstable across default prompting configurations and may require explicit profile-aware initialization. To support reproducible evaluation, we also contribute scalable and open LLM-driven infrastructure for regional-scale map generation, observability-enhanced simulation, mobility-metric computation, and traffic simulation. Our findings highlight the need for rigorous empirical validation of LLM-based urban simulators and provide practical tools for building more realistic and reproducible urban simulation systems.

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

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Kernels are Spectral Tensor Networks

arXiv:2606.20402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum kernels admit Fourier representations whose frequencies are determined by the data-encoding gates of the underlying feature map. We show that entangling tensor kernels are matrix product operator factorizations of the corresponding Fourier coefficient tensors, thereby identifying quantum kernels as spectral tensor networks. By grouping gate-level frequency configurations that yield the same feature-wise frequency, we obtain a grouped Fourier form that induces a more compact spectral tensor network representation of the kernel. We further show that kernel target alignment serves as a bridge between the Fourier and tensor network views. On a grid that resolves the accessible Fourier modes, it becomes the Frobenius cosine similarity between Fourier coefficient tensors. Our numerical experiments show that layered quantum kernels admit accurate representations with small bond dimension, revealing a compressibility governed by correlations between Fourier modes. This compressibility provides a diagnostic of classical representability and of whether kernel evaluation is likely to remain classically tractable.

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

Does Text Actually Help? Uncovering and Resolving Text Collapse in Multimodal Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose REST-TS (Residual-Exclusive Supervision for Text in Time Series), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

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

Rescaling MLM-Head for Neural Sparse Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders. A natural expectation is that replacing BERT with stronger pretrained encoders should improve retrieval effectiveness. However, we find that under standard SPLADE training recipes, backbones with large MLM-head L2 norms can suffer performance degradation and even training collapse under standard SPLADE training recipes. We identify this failure as a scale mismatch in the MLM head: SPLADE directly uses MLM-head outputs to construct sparse lexical representations, and query-document relevance is computed by an unnormalized dot product over these representations. As a result, an inflated MLM-head scale can amplify sparse activations, distort matching scores, and destabilize contrastive training under common training settings. To address this issue, we introduce a simple initialization-time correction that rescales the MLM-head projection by a constant factor before SPLADE training. This zero-cost adjustment improves training stability without modifying the model architecture or training objective. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval benchmarks, this simple correction substantially improves large-norm backbones such as ModernBERT and Ettin, turning unstable training runs into competitive sparse retrievers. In several settings, the corrected models further match or surpass the classic BERT-SPLADE baseline. These findings suggest that the bottleneck in adapting pretrained encoders to LSR is not encoder capacity alone, but the calibration of the MLM-head scale used to construct sparse lexical representations.

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

Leveraging Energy Features for Surface Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis Across Three Independent Datasets

arXiv:2606.18698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The energy-based method remains a comparatively underexamined approach for surface classification in mobile robotics, despite promising results in constrained environments. This study evaluated the viability of using energy-derived features as either a standalone classification modality or as supplementary input to inertial data. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted across three publicly available datasets, comparing the performance of modern deep learning architectures including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, encoder-only transformers, and Mamba state-space models, under automated hyperparameter tuning and input sequence length optimization. The models achieved higher accuracy than previously reported values on all evaluated datasets, with the convolutional neural network yielding the highest overall performance. When relying exclusively on energy-based features, the models attained classification accuracies in the range of 85-90%, approximately 5-10% lower than those achieved when combined with inertial features (96-99%). Augmenting inertial data with energy features resulted in a consistent mean accuracy improvement of 1-2%. These findings indicate that classifiers relying solely on energy features offer sufficient accuracy for standalone deployment, while also providing a consistent gain when used in combination with other sensing modalities.