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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Towards practical PDMP sampling: Metropolis adjustments, locally adaptive step-sizes, and NUTS-based time lengths

arXiv:2503.11479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) hold significant promise for sampling from complex probability distributions. However, their practical implementation is hindered by the need to compute model-specific bounds. Conversely, while Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) offers a generally efficient approach to sampling, its inability to adaptively tune step sizes impedes its performance when sampling complex distributions like funnels. To address these limitations, we introduce three innovative concepts: (a) a Metropolis-adjusted approximation for PDMP simulation that eliminates the need for explicit bounds without compromising the invariant measure, (b) an adaptive step size mechanism compatible with the Metropolis correction, and (c) a No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)-inspired scheme for dynamically selecting path lengths in PDMPs. These three ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a single, `doubly-adaptive' PDMP sampler with favourable robustness and efficiency properties.

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

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Collapsibility in Multiparametric Models of Random Simplicial Complexes

作者:

arXiv:2606.15276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study collapsibility in the multiparametric models of random simplicial complexes, namely the lower and upper models. In the upper model, we improve upon a result of Farber and Nowik, and assert that the homology is a.a.s concentrated in a single dimension by proving that the complex collapses to that \di. In the lower model, we prove that the complex a.a.s collapses to the \di\ with maximal non-trivial cohomology. We then compare this threshold to the ones derived previously for the special cases of the clique complex (by Kahle) and the Linial-Meshulam model.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flux-Guard: Facial Identity Protection using diffusion models

The widespread deployment of face recognition (FR) systems exposes personal images shared on social media and public platforms to identity linkage and privacy risks. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods can degrade unauthorized FR performance but are not compatible with generative face editing. Artificial intelligence-driven face editing tools are gaining popularity, which has significantly increased user demand for personalized portrait generation and social sharing. However, current editing methods often preserve identity features, making the edited images still susceptible to tracking by malicious FR systems. Thus, this paper proposes Flux-Guard, a privacy-preserving face editing framework based on adversarial attacks, which integrates face editing and privacy protection within a unified generative process. Specifically, we design a flow trajectory control method to align semantic manipulations with the generative process and introduce latent-space adversarial optimization with an adaptive perceptual-loss-driven weighting strategy, dynamically adjusting adversarial strength to maximize attack effectiveness while preserving visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flux-Guard supports face editing while significantly improving attack success rates against cross-domain face recognition models on the CelebA-HQ and LADN datasets. Furthermore, evaluation results for commercial APIs have confirmed its effectiveness in real-world applications. The code is released at https://github.com/JLMWang/Flux-Guard.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Network Routing based on Surface Code Error Correction

arXiv:2606.12781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum networks encounter unavoidable channel noises and erasure errors, presenting a huge obstacle in designing protocols that attain both high reliability and efficiency. Typically, quantum networks fall into two categories: those utilize quantum entanglements for quantum teleportation, and those directly transfer the actual quantum messages. In this paper, we present SurfNet, a quantum network that inherits the main advantages from both categories. It employs surface codes as logical qubits for encoding messages, and utilizes two parallel communication channels to fault-tolerantly transfer each surface code in a modular manner. Our approach of using surface codes can timely correct both operational and photon loss errors within the network, and the integration of the two channels within the network can greatly improve network throughput. For the implementation of SurfNet, we propose a novel network architecture, designed to better integrate surface codes into quantum networks. We also propose a novel error correction decoder, designed to fully utilize the modular characteristic of surface codes within our network. Simulation results demonstrate that SurfNet with its decoder significantly enhances the communication fidelity within quantum networks.

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

Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement

Existing unsupervised low-light image enhancement methods often encounter local exposure imbalance and color distortion under complex non-uniform illumination. In addition, most Vision Transformers lack an explicit mechanism for modeling the physical priors of illumination degradation. To address these limitations, we propose GLFS, a Gaussian light field splatting-based Vision Transformer that integrates continuous physical illumination modeling from Gaussian splatting into the Transformer architecture. In GLFS, scene illumination is represented by a superposition of anisotropic Gaussian basis functions. Physics-guided biases are introduced into self-attention to adaptively infer a spatial gain field, enabling accurate and uniform restoration under complex illumination. To reduce color bias and structural degradation during enhancement, a color-vector angular loss and a luminance-edge loss are further developed. These losses enforce hue consistency and improve the structural fidelity of local details. Extensive ablation studies and quantitative evaluations show that GLFS provides clear advantages in illumination correction and detail preservation. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers a new representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Discontinuous strong-to-weak symmetry breaking transition from thermal pure states

arXiv:2606.15062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the nonequilibrium dynamics of strong-to-weak spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body quantum systems undergoing decoherence from thermal pure states. For generic initial pure states with volume-law entanglement entropy, we show that the system undergoes a discontinuous dynamical phase transition at a critical time. This transition is accompanied by a singularity in the entropy of the system, which saturates to its maximum value at the same critical time. Through numerical simulations of the dephasing Ising and hard-core boson models, we establish the universality of this transition across different symmetries. Our results reveal that the dynamical emergence of a decohered mixed state from a highly entangled state is not a gradual asymptotic relaxation, but rather a sharp phase transition driven by a sudden collapse of global coherence.

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

Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models

Recent advances in spoken dialogue language models (SDLMs) reflect growing interest in shifting from turn-based to full-duplex systems, where the models continuously perceive user speech streams while generating responses. This simultaneous listening and speaking design enables real-time interaction and the agent can handle dynamic conversational behaviors like user barge-in. However, during the listening phase, existing systems keep the agent idle by repeatedly predicting the silence token, which departs from human behavior: we usually engage in lightweight thinking during conversation rather than remaining absent-minded. Inspired by this, we propose Chronological Thinking, an on-the-fly conversational thinking mechanism that aims to improve response quality in full-duplex SDLMs. Specifically, chronological thinking presents a paradigm shift from conventional LLM thinking approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought, purpose-built for streaming acoustic input. (1) Strictly causal: the agent reasons incrementally while listening, updating internal hypotheses only from past audio with no lookahead. (2) No additional latency: reasoning is amortized during the listening window; once the user stops speaking, the agent halts thinking and begins speaking without further delay. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of chronological thinking through both objective metrics and human evaluations show consistent improvements in response quality. Furthermore, chronological thinking robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bring My Cup! Personalizing Vision-Language-Action Models with Visual Attentive Prompting

arXiv:2512.20014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well to generic instructions, they struggle with personalized commands such as "bring my cup," where the robot must act on one specific instance among visually similar objects. We study this setting of manipulating personal objects, in which a VLA must identify and control a user-specific object unseen during training using only a few reference images. To address this challenge, we propose Visual Attentive Prompting (VAP), a simple-yet-effective training-free perceptual adapter that equips frozen VLAs with top-down selective attention. VAP treats the reference images as a non-parametric visual memory, grounds the personal object in the scene through open-vocabulary detection and embedding-based matching, and then injects this grounding as a visual prompt by highlighting the object and rewriting the instruction. We construct two simulation benchmarks, Personalized-SIMPLER and Personalized-VLABench, and a real-world tabletop benchmark to evaluate personalized manipulation across multiple robots and tasks. Experiments show that VAP consistently outperforms generic policies and token-learning baselines in both success rate and correct-object manipulation, helping to bridge the gap between semantic understanding and instance-level control.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Petrov-Galerkin Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Two-Dimensional Singularly Perturbed Problems

arXiv:2606.16510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study proposes a Petrov-Galerkin based Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network (VPINN) for efficiently solving two-dimensional singularly perturbed problems (SPPs) with one and two small perturbation parameters. The approach employs neural networks to construct the trial solution space, while tensor-product hat functions are adopted as test functions to enforce the variational form. To accurately resolve of sharp boundary layers, the variational form is implemented using a Petrov-Galerkin formulation. Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed directly, while the source terms are computed using automatic differentiation. Computational experiments on standard two-dimensional problems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy in both the maximum and L_2 norms. These results confirm the efficiency and robustness of the Petrov-Galerkin VPINN approach in accurately capturing the multiscale features of two-dimensional SPPs.

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

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reservoir-controlled electromagnetically induced gratings in a weakly driven two-level medium

arXiv:2606.13085v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We theoretically investigate the transmission and diffraction of a weak probe field from an electromagnetically induced grating formed in a weakly driven two-level medium coupled to engineered quantum reservoirs. Using a perturbative solution of the optical Bloch equations in the weak-driving regime, we analyze how normal-vacuum, thermal, and broadband squeezed-vacuum environments modify the probe susceptibility and consequently reshape both the spatial transmission function and the far-field diffraction patterns. We show that reservoir statistics have a pronounced impact on the diffraction response by altering the amplitude and phase of the induced grating. Thermal reservoirs enhance the transmission modulation and increase the intensity of the dominant diffraction orders, whereas squeezed-vacuum reservoirs generate strongly phase-sensitive modifications that selectively redistribute optical power among diffraction channels. We further demonstrate that the detuning between the squeezed reservoir and the driving field provides an efficient mechanism for controlling diffraction directionality, leading to substantial amplification of selected angular orders. In two-dimensional geometries, squeezed-vacuum correlations produce highly structured phase landscapes and strongly anisotropic diffraction patterns, enabling directional enhancement of specific diffraction channels while suppressing others. These results establish reservoir engineering as a versatile approach for controlling transmission, diffraction efficiency, and angular selectivity in minimal two-level systems, with potential applications in programmable photonic devices, beam steering, and quantum optical platforms.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

How ice forms is a mystery — now scientists are cracking the case

Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing. Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PaAno+: Multiscale Encoding and Cross-Variable Attention for Time Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.20055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series anomaly detection has significant practical value for industrial and medical monitoring, as well as other critical domains. Current Transformer- and large-model-based detection approaches incur excessive computational overhead, while existing lightweight alternatives are constrained by insufficient feature extraction and inadequate modeling of dependencies across multivariate variables. To mitigate the above drawbacks, this study develops a lightweight, efficient anomaly detection model, dubbed PaAno, within the patch-oriented representation learning paradigm. In the encoder module, a multiscale feature-extraction backbone is constructed using convolutional kernels with differentiated receptive fields to capture hierarchical temporal characteristics; subsequent cross-scale adaptive attention aggregation, combined with residual connection optimization, further stabilizes feature representation learning. A cross-variable fusion attention module is embedded to explicitly characterize inter-variable correlations, empowering the model to identify anomalous patterns amid intricate operational conditions. Moreover, a novel pretext task based on temporal patch-window sorting is customized to uncover intrinsic structural properties of time series, and triplet loss is leveraged to optimize the patch embedding space for enhanced feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the TSB-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PaAno achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on both univariate and multivariate tasks, yielding significant performance gains across evaluation metrics, including VUS-PR, relative to the original PaAno. Leveraging a compact network design, the presented model achieves favorable computational efficiency, enabling deployment on resource-limited terminals for real-time anomaly inference.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Nonlinear cascaded quantum network with giant emitters

arXiv:2404.09829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chiral quantum optics is central to developing scalable quantum networks, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on linear single-photon regimes. It remains unclear how to generate directional multiphotons. Here we show that giant emitters coupled to nonlinear quantum optical baths enable tunable directional correlated photons, revealing a mechanism for multiphoton directional emission. We demonstrate that the propagation phases of correlated photons, together with the coupling phases of giant emitters, can generate destructive interference in one direction while enhancing emission in the opposite direction, making directionality fully tunable. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a nonlinear cascaded quantum network paradigm mediated by correlated flying qubits, providing a configurable building block enabling distinct many-body applications beyond linear unidirectional setups. These results reveal a rich landscape for engineering multiphoton propagation and correlations through interference in giant emitter-nonlinear bath architectures, offering pathways for quantum networks and strongly correlated light-matter platforms.

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

MOSAIC: Modality-Specific Adaptation for Incremental Continual Learning in Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment

arXiv:2606.13258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gait-based Parkinson's disease assessment increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensors, but clinical systems rarely collect all modalities simultaneously. New sensors may arrive through device upgrades, protocol changes, or multi-center deployment, while historical patient data are often unavailable because of privacy and storage constraints. This modality-incremental setting faces three challenges: unreliable cross-modal distillation, modality-specific statistical shifts, and reduced plasticity after preservation. We propose MOSAIC, a compact continual learning framework. First, we identify the Toxic Teacher phenomenon and introduce Modality-Specific Warm-Up to stabilize newly learned modality representations before distillation. Second, we propose a statistics-decoupled MSBN architecture that isolates sensor statistics while maintaining a shared semantic backbone. Third, we design a curriculum-guided repulsive objective for Plasticity Recovery, preserving legacy knowledge while recovering modality-specific capacity. Experiments on three multimodal Parkinson's gait datasets show that MOSAIC improves final performance and mitigates forgetting. Project code is available at: https://github.com/minlinzeng/MOSAIC_Modality-Specific-Adaptation-for-Incremental-Continual-Learning-in-PD-Gait-Assessment.git

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Physics-IQ Verified

Video generative models ( VGMs) have become a new frontier that can be used not just for video generation but for a multitude of downstream tasks, including world modeling. To advance these tasks, a good video model must understand the physical reality of the world. Evaluating this understanding is an emerging field and has led to the Physics-IQ benchmark, which quantifies this explicitly by comparing model-generated videos to real-world videos of physical experiments. In this work, we present a systematic audit of the Physics-IQ benchmark, expose shortcomings and propose three solutions that sharpen how we can measure physical understanding of VGMs. Specifically, we improve prompt and ground-truth quality to reduce the influence of confounding factors and further introduce a sample-level scoring system that weights each sample and metric equally. Our resulting benchmark, Physics-IQ Verified, refines 57.6\% of all samples and improves over 34.8\% of prompts. In a comparison study using six image-to-video generative models, we observe moderate but meaningful ranking changes (Kendall's $\tau = 0.46$). We hope Physics-IQ Verified advances the community by providing a more reliable signal toward physically accurate VGMs. The code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-iq-benchmark

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

R2RDreamer: 3D-aware Data Augmentation for Spatially-generalized 2D Manipulation Policies

Spatial generalization is critical for imitation-learned manipulation policies, but achieving it typically requires scaling demonstrations across diverse object poses, robot configurations, and camera viewpoints. Data augmentation from a few source demonstrations offers a practical alternative to costly real-world collection. Simulation-based augmentation can create controllable variation, but requires complex environment and object setup and may introduce a sim-to-real gap. Recent real-to-real methods avoid these issues by jointly editing 3D observations and action trajectories from real demonstrations, yet they still rely on strong 3D scene parsing and geometry completion, and often produce observations tailored to 3D pointcloud policies rather than RGB-based 2D policies. We propose R2RDreamer, a real-to-real demonstration augmentation framework that preserves the geometric consistency of 3D action-observation editing while moving visual completion to 2D video space. Specifically, R2RDreamer first performs lightweight 3D augmentation by editing incomplete object pointclouds and end-effector trajectories in a shared 3D frame; it then projects the edited scene into masked image-space control videos with occlusion-aware reasoning and uses a dense-control image-to-video model to complete temporally coherent RGB observations. Experiments on spatially shifted manipulation tasks with both 2D diffusion-style policies and vision-language-action policies show that R2RDreamer improves spatial generalization from limited source demonstrations, with analyses validating the contributions of 3D editing, occlusion-aware projection, and video completion.

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

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens. In this work, we identify a distinct failure mode that previous study overlooked: Attention Distraction (AD). When the retrieved context is sufficient (highly relevant or including the correct answer), the retrieved text suppresses the visual attention globally, and the attention on image tokens shifts away from question-relevant regions. This leads to failures on questions the model could originally answer correctly without the retrieved text. To mitigate this issue, we propose MAD-RAG, a training-free intervention that decouples visual grounding from context integration through a dual-question formulation, combined with attention mixing to preserve image-conditioned evidence. Extensive experiments on OK-VQA, E-VQA, and InfoSeek demonstrate that MAD-RAG consistently outperforms existing baselines across different model families, yielding absolute gains of up to 4.76%, 9.20%, and 6.18% over the vanilla RAG baseline. Notably, MAD-RAG rectifies up to 74.68% of failure cases with negligible computational overhead.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entanglement as a Witness of Quantum Coherence: A Bipartite Monty-Hall Protocol

arXiv:2604.25953v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a bipartite protocol inspired by the Monty Hall puzzle that operationally distinguishes quantum coherence from classical ignorance. A principal qutrit is entangled with an ancillary qutrit via a controlled unitary, preparing $|\Psi\rangle = \frac{1}{\sqrt{3}}(|A,0\rangle + |B,1\rangle + |C,2\rangle)$. A rank-1 projective discard then eliminates one basis state, leaving a coherent superposition of the two remaining states. Finally, the ancilla and qutrit are measured, yielding joint probabilities that encode the interplay between superposition and measurement back-action. We show that the conditional probability $P(B|anc=0)$ takes the value $1/4$ in both quantum mechanics and the classical ignorant-host model, making it unsuitable as a witness. The true quantum-classical separation emerges in conditional joint probabilities that correlate ancilla outcomes with specific discard operations. We define witnesses $\mathcal{W}_{i,j} = P(anc=i, qutrit=j \mid discard k)$ where $j$ differs from the ancilla-implied state. Quantum mechanics predicts $\mathcal{W} = 1/4$, while any classical epistemic model with perfect initial correlations yields $\mathcal{W} = 0$. We provide the explicit $9 \times 9$ unitary matrix, a complete analysis of all measurement outcomes, and a detailed proof of the violation. The witness is fully immune to white noise and robust against moderate dephasing. The protocol requires only a single pair of entangled qutrits and sequential measurements – no spatial separation, no multiple copies, and no complex sets of incompatible observables. This makes it suitable for advanced undergraduate laboratories and provides a pedagogically accessible test of the ontic-epistemic distinction in quantum foundations.