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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Information Processing: A brief overview on Quantum Teleportation

作者:

arXiv:1604.00852v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Information Processing (QIP) exploits the principles of quantum mechanics to perform information storage, communication, and computation in ways that are fundamentally impossible within classical frameworks. This article presents a pedagogical overview of the mathematical foundations of quantum information theory, including qubits, Hilbert spaces, linear operators, quantum measurements, tensor products, density operators, and quantum entanglement. Building upon these concepts, we provide a detailed introduction to quantum teleportation, one of the most remarkable protocols in quantum communication. The discussion covers the no cloning theorem, the original teleportation protocol by Bennett et al., experimental realisations of quantum teleportation, and extensions involving probabilistic and multiqubit teleportation schemes. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of entanglement as a communication resource, together with the study of teleportation channels based on bipartite and multipartite quantum states. Various quantitative measures of entanglement, including concurrence, negativity, entanglement of formation, and relative entropy of entanglement, are reviewed alongside teleportation fidelity as a performance metric. Furthermore, the interplay between Bell nonlocality, mixed state entanglement, and teleportation efficiency is examined, followed by a survey of advanced developments such as controlled teleportation, bidirectional teleportation, cluster state teleportation, and recent advances in the Quantum 2.0 era. This review aims to provide students, researchers, and engineers with a coherent introduction to the theoretical foundations and practical significance of quantum teleportation in emerging quantum technologies.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

When Less Is Not More: DICEPro Mitigates the Impact of Incomplete Reference Matrices on Cellular Frequency Deconvolution.

Cellular deconvolution aims to estimate the frequencies of different cell populations from gene expression measurements in a biological sample. Supervised approaches, such as CIBERSORTx and DISSECT, critically depend on the reference signature matrix, which encodes the gene expression profiles of cell-types based on prior knowledge. Despite numerous deconvolution methods, the impact of missing cell populations in the reference matrix remains understudied. Here, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art deconvolution approaches using simulations based on real dataset examples combined with statistical modeling, validated against published data, and multiple real benchmark datasets. Results show that deconvolution performance remains stable when the reference matrix includes most cell-types, but declines sharply as the matrix becomes incomplete, especially for abundant cell populations. To address the limitations of incomplete reference matrices, we introduce DICEPro, an optimization-based framework designed to enhance existing deconvolution methods. By systematically adjusting the reference signatures, DICEPro better accounts for missing or underrepresented cell populations, leading to improved precision and robustness. We show that DICEPro consistently boosts deconvolution performance across both simulated datasets, derived from real data examples, and multiple real biological datasets, offering a practical solution when standard methods are hindered by incomplete references.

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

Temporal Validation Changes the Apparent Public-Health Utility of Under-Five Mortality Prediction in Bangladesh: A Four-Round DHS Machine-Learning Study

arXiv:2602.03957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Under-five mortality in Bangladesh remains uneven despite national progress. DHS-based prediction models may guide targeted follow-up, but only if validation reflects future use. We examined how validation design changes apparent prediction performance. Methods: Four BDHS rounds (2011-2022; 33,962 children; 1,290 deaths) were analysed with a 26-feature pipeline and three model classes under four validation regimes, including cross-survey temporal validation (train 2011+2014, calibrate 2017, test 2022). A 32-unit ELU multilayer perceptron was selected via genetic-algorithm neural architecture search. AUROC used 2,000 bootstrap resamples; screening utility used sensitivity, PPV, and number needed to screen (NNS) at fixed capacity. Results: Validation regime altered public-health interpretation more than model class. NAS MLP AUROC ranged from 0.669 (2022-only random) to 0.775 (pooled random), with temporal AUROC 0.730. At the top-10% temporal threshold, NAS identified 152/355 deaths in 2022 (sensitivity 42.8%, PPV 13.2%, NNS 7.6). NNS across designs ranged from 5.6 to 11.0. Conclusions: Validation-regime choice changed screening workload and apparent policy value more than architecture. Temporal validation supports defensible estimates of follow-up and referral demand; DHS child-mortality studies should report sensitivity, PPV, and NNS before programmatic use.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Variational Quantum Eigensolver-Based Quantum Bootstrap Embedding for Molecules

作者:

arXiv:2606.17095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating strongly correlated molecular systems on near-term quantum hardware remains challenging due to modern hardware's limited quantum volume and moderate-fidelity qubits. One potential way to circumvent this challenge is through bootstrap embedding (BE). Bootstrap embedding breaks molecules into smaller fragments that are then embedded into the "bath" of other fragments in an iterative way. Bootstrap embedding is appealing for quantum simulation because fragmenting the system reduces the qubit requirements for any given fragment. In this work, we develop a quantum bootstrap embedding (QBE) workflow that uses variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) fragment solvers and study the algorithmic choices that determine the overall VQE-QBE algorithm's success. To improve efficiency, we introduce FastAdaptVQE, a sparse matrix-accelerated form of the adaptive variational quantum eigensolver (ADAPT-VQE) that replaces symbolic commutator evaluation with direct statevector linear algebra, and MatrixFreeAdaptVQE, a matrix-free extension that removes the sparse-matrix memory bottleneck that appears when treating larger fragments. We also modify the ADAPT-VQE operator selection step by replacing the purely greedy choice with a look-ahead strategy. Benchmarks on $H_4$ and $F_2$ reach chemical accuracy, within 1 kcal/mol of bootstrap embedding results using a full configuration interaction (FCI) solver. These results show that combining QBE with VQE can accurately calculate energies of molecular systems. This research lays the foundation for extending energy calculations to larger molecular systems and quantum materials on near-term quantum hardware.

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

Efficient Zeroth-Order Federated Finetuning of Language Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

arXiv:2502.10239v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) across distributed data sources while preserving data privacy. However, finetuning such large models is challenging on edge devices due to its high resource demand. Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) estimates gradients through finite-difference approximations, which rely on function evaluations under random perturbations of the model parameters. Consequently, ZO with task alignment provides a potential solution, allowing finetuning using only forward passes with inference-level memory requirements and low communication overhead, but it suffers from slow convergence and higher computational demand. In this paper, we propose a new ZO-based method that applies a more efficient technique to reduce the computational demand associated with using a large number of perturbations while preserving their convergence benefits. This is achieved by splitting the model into consecutive blocks and allocating a higher number of perturbations to the second block, enabling efficient reuse of intermediate activations to update the full network with fewer forward evaluations. Our evaluation on RoBERTa-large, OPT1.3B, LLaMa-3-3.2B models shows up to $3\times$ reduction in computation compared to the other ZO-based techniques, while retaining the memory and communication benefits over first-order federated learning techniques.

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

Integral Formulation of QENDy for Robust Nonlinear System Identification

arXiv:2606.11629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This manuscript proposes an integral formulation of the newly defined quadratic embedding method for identifying nonlinear systems (QENDy). In the original algorithm, trajectory data points along with their time derivatives are used. Methods for calculating time derivatives make the algorithm sensitive to noise. Our integral formulation does not use the time derivatives. This results in a more robust method to learn the dynamics.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Model Knows, the Decoder Finds: Future Value Guided Particle Power Sampling

arXiv:2605.02427v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring pattern in "reasoning without training" is that base LLMs already assign non-trivial probability mass to correct multi-step solutions; the bottleneck is locating these modes efficiently at inference time. Power sampling provides a principled way to bias decoding toward such modes by targeting p_theta(x)^alpha with alpha > 1, but practical approximations must account for future-dependent correction factors that determine which prefixes remain promising. We introduce Auxiliary Particle Power Sampling (APPS), a blockwise particle algorithm for approximating the sequence-level power target with a bounded population of partial solutions. APPS propagates hypotheses in parallel using proposal-corrected power reweighting and refines their survival through future-value-guided selection at resampling boundaries. This redistributes finite compute across competing prefixes rather than committing to a single unfolding path, while providing a direct scaling knob in the particle count and predictable peak memory. We instantiate the future-value signal with short-horizon rollouts and also study an amortized variant that replaces rollouts with a lightweight learned selection head. AMore broadly, APPS improves the accuracy–runtime trade-off of training-free decoding, further supporting the view that inference-time power approximation can recover gains often attributed to post-training.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NaturalFlow: Reducing Disruptive Pauses for Natural Speech Flow in Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation

Simultaneous speech-to-speech translation aims to enable near-real-time communication by minimizing latency, offering a compelling, real-time alternative to the high latency of consecutive translation. However, the excessive pursuit of low latency often results in fragmented chunk-wise speech. Consequently, listeners are subjected to an unnatural acoustic flow punctuated by frequent pauses, which could increase their cognitive load. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fluency-aware optimization framework designed to discover the sweet spot between the low-latency benefits of simultaneous translation and the natural flow of consecutive translation. Our framework minimizes inter-chunk silences by leveraging model-internal signals, including linguistic diversity and induced temporal variability in speech durations. Experiments on short- and long-form benchmarks show that our framework produces natural speech flow while maintaining competitive latency and translation quality.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Home-based binocular serious games in virtual reality to treat visual acuity and stereovision in residual amblyopia: AMBER study

Objectives: Amblyopia is a pediatric visual disorder traditionally treated by patching the fellow eye, though many patients retain residual amblyopia post-treatment. Increasing evidence suggests that visual plasticity allows treat-ment beyond the classical therapeutic window. AMBER evaluated the efficacy of binocular serious games in virtual reality (VR) in residual amblyopia. Methods and Analysis: The monocentric, prospective, randomized, crossover trial (reported as case series) includ-ed 14 anisometropic, strabismic, or mixed residual amblyopia patients (6-35 years; 5 children, 9 adults). Participants underwent two 2-month intervention phases: optical correction (standard care) and standard care plus VR games (2.5 h/week), each with a 2-month follow-up. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), stereoacuity, and reading speed were assessed (5 timepoints) using the Sloan and Landolt charts, the Titmus, TNO, Lang II, Asteroid, and Mnread tests. Compliance and adverse events (AE) were recorded. Results: VR training improved BCVA in 10 amblyopic eyes (Landolt and Sloan), with more pronounced effects in anisometropic patients. Six patients showed improved stereoacuity (Titmus; 4x mixed, 1x anisometropic, 1x stra-bismic amblyopia), persistent only in children (1x strabismic, 1x mixed amblyopia). Four improvements were ob-served with TNO (1x), Lang II (1x), Asteroid (0x), and MNread (1x). Despite positive trends, when comparing re-sults of individual patients, between both eyes, and with standard treatment, consistency of improvements cannot be conclusively demonstrated. One non-severe AE (dizziness) was reported. Conclusions: Following individual cases, VR training improved BCVA and stereoacuity, particularly in children and patients with high compliance. However, considering the cohort as a whole, consistency of effects has to be confirmed in larger groups. Thus, the methodologically sophisticated AMBER study revealed differences in VR treatment efficacy between amblyopia types, children/adults, endpoints and tests, offering precious data for the design of meaningful future studies. It shows that neurovisual plasticity gauged by VR-games offers safe, engaging treatment options for residual amblyopia.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Latent Confounded Causal Discovery via Lie Bracket Geometry

arXiv:2606.19610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on Kan-Do-Calculus (KDC) has established that the boundary between passive observation and active intervention in causal inference is a category-theoretic bi-adjunction, with interventions modeled by left Kan extensions and conditioning by right Kan extensions. This paper introduces two causal discovery algorithms under latent confounding, building on the information-geometric and categorical consequences of KDC. In smooth statistical settings, Radon-Nikodym derivatives between observational and interventional measures induce local causal vector fields; failures of these fields to close under Lie brackets become computable Frobenius residuals, which we interpret as witnesses of failed visible integrability and possible latent or unmodeled structure. Our first algorithm, BRIDGE (Bracket Residuals for Interventional Discovery and Geometric Estimation), combines an interventional density or Radon-Nikodym-ratio engine with a geometric screen that proposes a high-recall family of admissible arrows, identifies non-closing visible pairs as latent-obstruction candidates, and passes the reduced family to downstream score-based or differentiable discovery routines. The second algorithmic contribution, Spectral Kan-Do Flow Matching (SKFM), learns amortized intervention fields and factors latent curvature spectrally, exposing the direct Lie-space endpoint toward which BRIDGE points. A detailed set of experiments show that both algorithms are capable of discovering causal models with latent confounders while collapsing the super-exponential space of possible DAGs by many orders of magnitude. This paper introduces a new paradigm in causal discovery, where latent structure is inferred directly from the geometry of intervention-induced flows.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Token Complexity of Certifying Stochastic-Oracle Reliability

作者:

arXiv:2606.24074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wang[Wang2026] introduced the Stochastic-Oracle Turing Machine (SOTM) framework and defined token complexity as the minimum expected cost of interacting with a stochastic oracle needed to attain a specified solution quality for a task. This paper develops an analogous notion for certifying the reliability of a stochastic oracle on a given domain. Certification token complexity is the minimum expected token cost required, with controlled error probability, to distinguish oracles that meet a target reliability level from those that fall below a lower reliability threshold. We construct an SPRT-based certification SOTM that queries the oracle, computes binary correctness scores, and stops when the accumulated log-likelihood evidence crosses a decision threshold. The SOTM halts almost surely, satisfies the desired two-sided error guarantee over the reliability regions to be certified, and yields an explicit upper bound on certification token complexity in terms of the reliability thresholds, the error bound, and the expected per-turn token cost. We then establish a matching information-theoretic lower bound: even with adaptive queries, every error-bounded certification SOTM must incur the same leading-order expected token cost as the SPRT-based construction as the prescribed error bound tends to zero. Together, these bounds characterize the leading-order certification token complexity in the small-error regime.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reasoning for Mobile User Experience with Multimodal LLMs: Task, Benchmark, and Approach

arXiv:2606.13192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User experience (UX) centered on usability, perceived consistency, and functional clarity is fundamental to real-world user interfaces (UI). The application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in the field of user interfaces is evolving rapidly, such as visual element grounding, graphical user interface (GUI) agents, and design-to-code generation. However, research efforts on evaluating UX based on UI screenshots are still immature. To address this, we propose UXBench, a novel multimodal benchmark consisting of 2,000 VQA data samples designed to assess MLLMs' ability to perform UI-based reasoning. UXBench includes 8 tasks based on real-world UI screenshots that require fine-grained diagnosis of UX issues across layout relationships, visual hierarchy, and content consistency. Our extensive evaluation of mainstream MLLMs shows that they remain fundamentally limited in their capacity for UI-based reasoning. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area. To bridge this gap, we propose UI-UX, an MLLM based on Qwen3-VL-4B-Thinking foundation model and enhanced via reinforcement learning with two key innovations: a reward routing mechanism that dynamically balances perceptual understanding and logical reasoning during inference, and an asymmetric transition reward that suppresses redundant or insufficient reasoning steps. Experiments demonstrate that UI-UX achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on UXBench, attaining an accuracy of 0.7963 – surpassing Claude-4.5-Sonnet's 0.6550 – while exhibiting strong generalization across diverse UI tasks and maintaining low inference latency.

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

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Nominal Intensity to Equivalent Rainfall: A Path-Based Credibility Evaluation Framework for Simulated Rainfall in Autonomous-Driving Perception Tests

Credible simulated-rainfall conditions are essential for identifying perception-system boundaries and supporting SOTIF-oriented risk assessment in automated driving. However, closed-field tests are often described only by nominal rainfall intensity or single-point measurements, making it difficult to align simulated rain fields with real rainfall and map test results to real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a path-based credibility evaluation method for simulated rainfall in autonomous-driving perception tests. Using the drop size and velocity joint distribution of real rainfall as the reference, each candidate path is represented by path-equivalent rainfall intensity, an uncertainty band, and a path-averaged Realism of Raindrop Distribution (RRD) score. Lidar target point-cloud count and mean reflectivity are further used for perception-consistency correction, quantifying the proxy capability of each simulated-rainfall path for real-rainfall perception effects. Experiments are conducted using about 10,000 real-rainfall raindrop-spectrum samples, 728 RainSense perception samples, and 45 spatial sampling points in a 2.4 m x 7.2 m simulated-rainfall area. Results show that spatial non-uniformity remains under the same nominal condition, confirming the need for path-based evaluation. The method identifies Path IV and Path VI as preferable candidates, with results of 11.54 +/- 0.31 mm/h, RRD = 0.43, and 8.28 +/- 0.34 mm/h, RRD = 0.46, respectively. These paths show more balanced performance in rainfall-intensity stability, raindrop-spectrum realism, and perception consistency. The proposed method supports path selection, condition description, and credible interpretation of autonomous-driving perception tests under rainfall.

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

ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv:2606.20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.

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

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Plug-and-Adapt: Multimodal Coreference Resolution at First Sight with a Pretrained Alignment Model

Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains. However, existing Multi-modal Coreference Resolution (MCR) methods require training with (partially) annotated data from the target dataset before they can be applied, preventing their direct usability and raising concerns about generalization. While Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) with billions of parameters offer promising zero-shot capabilities, they remain largely inaccessible. Their massive size limits deployability, and many are only accessible through paid APIs. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-adapt method that strategically adapts a carefully pre-trained alignment model for immediate use in MCR tasks, designed to eliminate the need for training on scarce benchmark datasets or relying on resource-intensive VLLMs. Specifically, we first pre-train a fine-grained alignment model between textual and visual contextual information using vision-language alignment datasets. We then repurpose the alignment model to MCR through similarity aggregation by fusing visual and categorical cues with evidence theory, thereby enhancing effectiveness. Experiments on the Coreference Image Narratives (CIN) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 5.31\% and 2.12\% improvement in CoNLL F1 over SOTA dedicated methods and popular VLLMs, respectively. We further evaluate our method on a masked CIN dataset for robustness testing and on a specially constructed VCR-MCR dataset for generalization assessment, with results confirming both capabilities.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VSANet: View-aware Sparse Attention Network for Light Field Image Denoising

Light field (LF) image denoising is challenging due to the high-dimensional structure of LF data. While noise is independent across sub-aperture images, scene content exhibits strong cross-view correlations. We introduce VSANet, a view-aware sparse attention network for LF denoising. Specifically, we propose a view-aware sparse attention (VSA) block that represents the 4D LF feature map as a unified spatial-angular token space and performs cross-view aggregation via locality-sensitive hashing-based sparse attention. This enables global feature interactions with linear complexity, effectively exploiting LF correlations across views and spatial locations. In addition, we design a feature refinement (FR) block to emphasize informative features in spatial, angular, and epipolar subspaces. The VSA and FR blocks are integrated within a sequential attention refinement module, forming the core of VSANet. Experiments demonstrate VSANet outperforms stateof-the-art LF denoising methods.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Attacking the First-Principle: A Black-Box, Query-Free Targeted Mimicry Attack on Binary Function Classifiers

arXiv:2605.18231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Binary function classifiers play a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of software systems by detecting malicious code and unauthorized modifications. However, machine learning-based classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can evade detection. In this study, we present Kelpie, a novel framework for executing mimicry attacks, a stronger type of targeted evasion attacks, on binary function classifiers in a black-box, zero-query setting. Unlike previous approaches that rely on querying the target classifier to refine untargeted evasion attacks, Kelpie leverages code transformations that preserve the functionality of malicious payloads while causing them to be misclassified as we want. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Kelpie can successfully execute mimicry attacks against six state-of-the-art binary function classifiers representing different model architectures without requiring direct interaction with them. We further validate our approach with a practical demonstration, involving a keylogger and a wiper concealed within benign-looking functions embedded in an application. This work, to our best knowledge, is the first to demonstrate such a mimicry attack in a black-box, zero-query context, raising important questions about the reliability and security of existing machine learning-based binary function classifiers.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian for Projective Quantum Feature Maps

arXiv:2606.13641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projected quantum feature maps provide a strategy for using quantum processors as feature generators for classical machine-learning models. Building on counterdiabatic Ising-glass and one-dimensional Heisenberg PQFMs, we introduce a generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian-based PQFM that provides a unified way to encode classical features through local Pauli fields and pairwise two-qubit Pauli interactions. This construction allows distinct classical variables to be embedded along different Pauli axes of the same qubit, increasing the information density of shallow circuits while remaining compatible with hardware constraints. We develop and implement these methods in pqfmlib, a publicly available Python library for constructing, executing, and benchmarking Hamiltonian-based PQFMs.We then benchmark the generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs against reference PQFMs on four biomedical classification datasets under a nested cross-validation protocol with paired statistical tests. Quantum features are generated using both IBM quantum processors with up to 156 qubits and statevector simulations. Our results show that the generalized two-qubit Hamiltonian family provides the most consistent pattern of statistically supported gains over matched classical baselines, although the performance of all methods depends on the dataset, encoding strategy, measured observables, and hardware conditions. These findings support generalized Hamiltonian PQFMs as a promising route toward near-term quantum utility.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Distributed Inference of LLMs on a P2P Network

arXiv:2606.17059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching can reduce LLM inference latency by reusing KV caches across requests with shared prompts, but cluster-scale reuse is challenging because caches are partitioned across nodes. We propose a decentralized, prefix-cache-aware routing scheme for peer-to-peer LLM serving. Each node maintains a local radix tree of its own cached prefixes and asynchronously refreshed estimates of peer caches using periodic anti-entropy. Requests are routed to the node with the longest estimated prefix match, without centralized coordination or KV-cache transfer. Stale metadata only causes cache misses, not incorrect outputs, making weak consistency sufficient for correctness. Evaluation on simulated MMLU workloads show that decentralized routing improves latency under low communication delay and skewed prefix distributions, while high network latency and affinity-induced hotspots limit its benefits.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation via Geometry Decoupling and Momentum-Aware Gradient Regulation

Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation (HKD) aims to transfer knowledge across varying architectures (e.g., from Transformer to CNN) but inherently suffers from severe training instability. We reveal that this instability stems from two highly coupled challenges: massive feature norm discrepancies that cause optimization drag, and severe gradient conflicts between the primary and distillation objectives arising from distinct inductive biases. To achieve stable distillation, we propose SPOFA, a framework built upon a novel Feature and Gradient Dual Stabilization mechanism. Specifically, at the feature level, we introduce a LayerNorm-based decoupling projector that explicitly decouples feature magnitude from direction, creating a bounded and stable space for semantic alignment. At the gradient level, we propose a momentum-driven Exponential Moving Average (MEMA) dynamic scaler. By establishing a robust historical baseline of the optimization trajectory, MEMA actively evaluates instantaneous gradient conflicts and adaptively penalizes harmful distillation signals, guaranteeing stable convergence. Importantly, SPOFA achieves this dual stabilization with an extremely lightweight parameter footprint. Extensive experiments on two mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that SPOFA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, significantly outperforming computationally expensive methods while introducing only minimal computational overhead compared to standard baselines.