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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Sanjeevani: A manually curated anti-cancerous phytochemical database integrated with downstream analysis tools.

Background: Cancer continues to pose a massive global health burden. While plant-derived phytochemicals offer promising therapeutic leads, existing natural product databases often lack cancer specificity, dataset downloadability, and integrated screening tools. Methods: We developed Sanjeevani, an integrative web platform cataloguing 4,823 curated anticancer phytochemicals. Using a balanced dataset of 9,646 molecules, we trained Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers using a hybrid feature representation of RDKit descriptors and 2048-bit ECFP4 fingerprints. The platform also integrates AutoDock Vina for web-based molecular docking for binding affinity, poses prediction and ADMET-AI for pharmacokinetics estimation. Results: The SVM model demonstrated the strongest predictive capability, achieving a top test accuracy of 0.966 and a ROC-AUC of 0.992. Benchmarking across five docking tools confirmed that AutoDock Vina successfully balanced computational automation with literature-consistent binding affinity replication. The final architecture provides rapid interactive 2D/3D visualizations integrated with downstream analysis tools. Conclusion: Sanjeevani provides an open-access, one-stop pipeline that bridges the gap between raw natural product data and actionable computational screening, accelerating natural product-based oncology drug discovery.

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

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

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

Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Networks for Intelligent Network Control

arXiv:2606.13848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile networks continue to grow in complexity and next generation networks are expected to support both increasing traffic loads and more diverse services. As network complexity rises, optimizing antenna parameters under dynamic or changing objectives becomes increasingly challenging. We propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithm for high-level control and orchestration of mobile networks. The Temporally Consistent Graph Q-Network (TC-GQN) algorithm learns a self-predicting representation of the whole network that is task-independent and aggregates information from all base-stations. A graph neural network is trained using a global reward function to assign coordinated local actions based on the learned encoding of the global network state. We evaluate the algorithm in a simulated environment to orchestrate an energy-saving feature across multiple sectors and multiple carriers under different quality of service (QoS) constraints. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based baselines and a competitive rule-based controller by improving hardware sleep time while maintaining QoS. Moreover, the learned representation enables rapid adaptation to changing intents.

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

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

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

Photon anti-bunching in high harmonic generation

arXiv:2606.17620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon anti-bunching is the direct evidence for the existence of photons without having a classical counterpart. Unlike bunching of photons, which can have a semi-classical description, the effect of photon anti-bunching can only be understood with quantized electromagnetic fields. However, for the process of high harmonic generation (HHG), where many photons of the driving field are upconverted to a single photon of higher energy, there is yet no clear evidence for the presence of individual photon emission. The key result of this work is the prediction of photon anti-bunching in the process of HHG, marking it the first theoretical discovery of non-classicality in the temporal correlations of HHG photons. While other non-classical signatures in HHG, such as sub-Poissonian statistics or squeezing, have been discussed for an ensemble of photons, the anti-bunching signature reported here is a signature of a single photon. This is achieved by using the recently developed Heisenberg picture approach for quantum optical HHG, revealing clear anti-bunching signatures in the intensity correlation function across the entire harmonic spectrum.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

When Does Trajectory-Level Supervision Permit Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning?

arXiv:2606.18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes. We develop a statistical theory for offline policy optimization from such outcome-level supervision. We first study the canonical setting where the target remains the expected cumulative reward, but each offline trajectory provides only a scalar label whose conditional mean is the cumulative return. We propose OPAC, a pessimistic actor-critic algorithm that learns a latent reward model and optimizes a policy from trajectory-level labels. We prove a high-probability guarantee of order $\widetilde O(H^2\sqrt{C_{sa}(\pi^\star)/n})$ and a matching lower bound, characterizing the sharp statistical cost of replacing process-level rewards with one trajectory-level label. We then extend the principle to preference-based feedback, preserving the leading horizon and concentrability dependence up to preference-model constants. Finally, we study generalized outcome-based offline RL, where both the supervision and the objective are trajectory-level quantities induced by a nonlinear aggregation of latent per-step rewards. This problem is not learnable in general: for all-success objectives, any offline learner may require $\Omega(2^H)$ trajectories even with deterministic transitions and constant concentrability. We then identify a tractable regime through two structural coefficients, $\kappa_\mu(\sigma)$ and $\chi_\mu(\sigma)$, capturing information loss in outcome aggregation and generalized Bellman updates, under which generalized OPAC achieves polynomial sample complexity. Together, our results delineate when outcome-level supervision enables sample-efficient offline control and when missing process-level rewards create fundamental statistical barriers.

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

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Vanishing Depth: Training Generalized Depth Adapters with Sinusoidal Depth Preprocessing for Pretrained RGB Encoders

Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders with a depth adapter to incorporate and align metric depth into a combined latent space without interfering with the pretrained RGB feature extraction. In combination with our sinusoidal depth encoding, the depth adapter enables generalized and robust depth density and distribution invariant feature extraction. Our depth adapters improve a wide set of generalized RGB baselines across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks in segmentation, pose estimation, and depth completion – without the necessity of finetuning. Most importantly, we achieve 56.05 mIoU in the SUN-RGBD segmentation, while outperforming SOTA depth-aware and multi-modal encoders in our experiments. When no depth is present, one can activate our depth adapter with an empty map, use single pixel depth clues, or monocular depth estimation to include the depth aware feature extraction into subsequent downstream tasks.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Backward Stochastic Partial Differential Integral Equations: Solvability and Comparison Principle

arXiv:2606.16237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The paper is concerned with the well-posedness of backward stochastic partial differential equations with jumps, also called backward stochastic partial differential integral equations. We start from the proof for the existence and uniqueness of solution to backward stochastic evolution equation with jump in the Gelfand triple framework. Then the well-posedness of both weak solution and strong solution to backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is obtained with the Gelfand triple replaced by specific Sobolev spaces. Finally, the comparison principle for backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is proved, which has potential applications in financial mathematics.

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

TriAdReview: Triangular Adversarial Review Architecture for Multi-Model Technical Document Generation

arXiv:2606.15074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p

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

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Minimum Zero-Forcing Sets

arXiv:2606.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores the problem of finding the minimum zero-forcing set on undirected graphs and proposes an adapted machine-learning framework to solve the problem. The minimum zero-forcing set problem is a graph coloring problem where the color of an initial set of nodes propagates throughout a network. The set of nodes is zero-forcing if it forces all uncolored nodes to change color under the constraint of the color-change rule. There are several applications to this problem across different domains such as network science, network control, and designing logical circuits. Finding the minimum zero-forcing set is shown to be NP-hard. We propose a reinforcement learning framework, SD-ZFS, that adapts the S2V-DQN architecture to the ZFS problem. We train several models on this adapted framework and analyze the performance across graph datasets that have varying structures. We evaluate how the models trained on the framework generalize, scale, and transfer to different network types. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework when compared against the optimal solution and greedy heuristic. We provide further insight into how the ZFS problem can be solved through machine-learning and the influence of network structure on the problem.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CottonLeafVision: An Explainable and Robust Deep Learning Framework for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification

Globally, cotton is a highly economically beneficial crop, as the textile industry heavily depends on it. So, the precise identification and detection of cotton leaf disease is crucial for economic stability. The development goal of "CottonLeafVision" is to accurately classify and detect cotton leaf disease. With this goal, we have evaluated multiple pretrained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, including DenseNet201, InceptionV3, and VGG19 on a publicly available cotton leaf disease image dataset. This image dataset includes seven classes, six disease classes, and one healthy class, collected under various field conditions reflecting real-world challenges. Among these pretrained models, with DenseNet201, we have achieved the highest classification accuracy of 98%. To enhance the model reliability and interpretability, we have implemented different techniques and methods such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), occlusion sensitivity analysis and adversarial training to increase the noise resistance of the model. Finally, we have developed a prototype in order to utilize the model's capabilities on real life agriculture. This paper shows the deep learning model's capabilities to classify the disease in real-life cotton disease management situations.

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

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

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

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per prompt, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and that DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning in robotic systems at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SPARK: Security Knowledge Priming and Representation-Guided Knowledge Activation for LLM-based Secure Code Generation

arXiv:2606.16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely generate code with exploitable security flaws. Prior literature attributes this limitation to a lack of security expertise, steering current defense mechanisms toward heavy fine-tuning or external knowledge retrieval, which introduces significant computational overhead and data bias through redundant code examples. Contrary to this view, we argue that pretraining corpora are already rich in security material. The bottleneck is activation: without an explicit and brief cue, statistical pressure toward common training-distribution patterns suppresses the model's safety-relevant representations. We present SPARK, an inference-time security harness that activates this latent knowledge without any retraining. The harness has two parts. Component~I retrieves a few of the relevant Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entries for each coding task and appends a short structured cue to the prompt; this alone is enough to surface the model's existing security representations. Component~II adds a precomputed token bias to the logits at every decoding step. We obtain the bias by projecting a safe-direction vector, the unit difference between the mean safe and mean unsafe last-layer hidden states, through the language model head. The bias is computed once offline; applying it costs a single vector addition per generated token. We evaluate SPARK on 9 open-source models across C++, Java, and Python, and compare with 7 baselines spanning fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented methods. SPARK matches or improves on the best baseline in every setting while preserving HumanEval utility. We further test Component~I in a black-box setting on 7 of today's strongest models, including Claude, DeepSeek, and GPT, demonstrating the bottleneck of insecure code generation and the improvements enabled by our method.

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

Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation for Parameterized Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2603.13751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have achieved notable success in modeling dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). To avoid computationally expensive retraining under new physical conditions, parameterized PINNs (P$^2$INNs) commonly adapt pre-trained operators using singular value decomposition (SVD) for out-of-distribution (OOD) regimes. However, SVD-based fine-tuning often suffers from rigid subspace locking and truncation of important high-frequency spectral modes, limiting its ability to capture complex physical transitions. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods appear to be promising alternatives, applying conventional adapters such as LoRA to P$^2$INNs introduces a severe Pareto trade-off, as additive updates increase parameter overhead and disrupt the structured physical manifolds inherent in operator representations. To address these limitations, we propose Manifold-Orthogonal Dual-spectrum Extrapolation (MODE), a lightweight micro-architecture designed for physics operator adaptation. MODE decomposes physical evolution into complementary mechanisms including principal-spectrum dense mixing that enables cross-modal energy transfer within frozen orthogonal bases, residual-spectrum awakening that activates high-frequency spectral components through a single trainable scalar, and affine Galilean unlocking that explicitly isolates spatial translation dynamics. Experiments on challenging PDE benchmarks including the 1D Convection–Diffusion–Reaction equation and the 2D Helmholtz equation demonstrate that MODE achieves strong out-of-distribution generalization while preserving the minimal parameter complexity of native SVD and outperforming existing PEFT-based baselines.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments

arXiv:2605.02926v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript maps secure-supply and criticality risks for quantum technologies deployed in extreme environments, linking upstream critical minerals and materials (CMMs) to downstream system performance, continuity of security, and mission assurance. It adopts a reproducible "Critical Level I" screening method to identify materials whose supply concentration, essentiality, and limited mitigatability can create bottlenecks for quantum deployment. The analysis is structured around two use cases: (i) niobium as a key input for superconducting quantum computing and related manufacturing and toolchain dependencies; and (ii) space-qualified superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), alongside adjacent single-photon detector platforms such as SPADs, where radiation, thermal cycling, vibration, and electromagnetic interference can degrade device metrics and, in communications settings, threaten continuity of security. The manuscript further situates these dependencies within U.S.-China strategic competition over critical materials, refining capacity, export controls, and overseas mineral acquisitions, while also connecting them to standards-first governance, post-quantum cryptography migration, and the emerging security logic of quantum networking. It argues that static national critical-minerals lists are insufficient for mission-relevant quantum technology and proposes a dedicated Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard as a living decision-support tool for tracking concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum platforms. The paper concludes with implications for substitution, diversification, stockpiling, shielding, qualification-by-design, and standards-aligned governance to support secure, sustained, and mission-relevant quantum deployment.

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

The Measurement Gap in the Automation of EU Law: Benchmarking Doctrinal Legal Reasoning under the EU AI Act

Large language models now produce legal text of at least median quality, yet no existing benchmark can evaluate whether they perform doctrinal legal reasoning, which forms the interpretive core of legal work, rather than the ancillary, paralegal tasks that most current legal-AI evaluations measure. This measurement gap is not only methodological but legal: the EU AI Act makes "appropriate accuracy" a binding requirement for high-risk AI used in the judicial domain, yet that requirement cannot acquire operational content without the very doctrinal-reasoning benchmark the field lacks.

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

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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

Light-weight Pronunciation Assessment via Discrete Speech Token Surprisal

Training automated pronunciation assessment often relies on labeled learner errors or non-native corpora that are costly to collect. We propose a lightweight framework trained only on native speech resources, operating unsupervised or lightly calibrated with a small set of scored utterances. At inference, learner speech is discretized with an SSL encoder and a K-means codebook. A token language model trained on native sequences computes surprisal where higher surprisal indicates phonotactic deviation. We add a transcript-guided Text2DUnit–DTW module that predicts native token sequences from reference text and aligns them to acoustic tokens to derive error-sensitive features. Surprisal and alignment features are fused via simple regression. On SpeechOcean762, PCC improves from 0.60 to 0.66 with transcript guidance, near supervised baselines. Cross-dataset evaluation on L2-ARCTIC shows consistent gains.

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

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

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

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.