Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Allure of Craquelure: A Variational-Generative Approach to Crack Detection in Paintings

Recent advances in imaging technologies, deep learning and numerical performance have enabled non-invasive detailed analysis of artworks, supporting their documentation and conservation. In particular, automated detection of craquelure in digitized paintings is crucial for assessing degradation and guiding restoration, yet remains challenging due to the possibly complex scenery and the visual similarity between cracks and crack-like artistic features such as brush strokes or hair. We propose a hybrid approach that models crack detection as an inverse problem, decomposing an observed image into a crack-free painting and a crack component. A deep generative model is employed as powerful prior for the underlying artwork, while crack structures are captured using a Mumford–Shah-type variational functional together with a crack prior. Joint optimization yields a pixel-level map of crack localizations in the painting.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

arXiv:2606.17924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models face a trade-off between efficient action generation and explicit deliberation. Directly decoding actions from vision-language backbone representations enables low-latency control, whereas explicit reasoning through textual chains, pixel-level subgoals, or action search can improve planning but incurs substantial latency and computational cost. We propose PearlVLA, a VLA framework that moves deliberation into the latent space of a vision-language model (VLM). PearlVLA separates VLM meta-query representations into a fixed visual grounding branch and an iterative latent plan branch. At each refinement round, a plan-conditioned world query probes a lightweight frozen latent world model for an action-free future observation latent, which is fed back to guide plan refinement. A future-guided RefineNet then applies scheduled residual updates to progressively refine a coarse semantic draft into a fine-grained latent action plan. The refined plan after K rounds is then decoded in parallel into an action chunk for low-latency execution. We further introduce Causal Refinement-Grouped Process-Reward RL to optimize the latent refinement process with rewards from longer-horizon imagined futures induced by latent plan edits. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that PearlVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

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

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs. Prior works attempted to solve this with static heuristics or external retrieval modules to feed frame-level information, but these approaches often fail to capture visual cues grounded to the given user queries conflating raw visual dynamics with true semantic relevance. In this paper, we introduce ReFoCUS (Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual UnderStanding), the first framework to integrate online policy-gradient reinforcement learning into frame-level optimization for video-LLMs. ReFoCUS aims to learn a frame selection policy, leveraging reward signals derived from reference models to capture their underlying scoring behavior over frame combinations that best support temporally grounded responses. To efficiently explore the large combinatorial frame space, we employ an autoregressive and query-conditional selection architecture that ensures contextual consistency while reducing complexity. Our policy learning removes the need for explicit frame-level supervision, as it implicitly discovers optimal and semantically consistent frame compositions. ReFoCUS consistently improves reasoning accuracy across multiple video QA benchmarks, demonstrating the advantage of aligning frame selection with model-internal utility.

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

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

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

Coping in Crisis: Computational Modeling of Coping Styles in Digital Crisis Discourse During the 2023 Turkiye Earthquake

How do people cope when disaster strikes and can we detect it at scale, in real time, from what they write? This study addresses that question using over one million Turkish-language tweets posted in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Turkiye, which unfolded in a deeply polarized political context just months before a national election. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) coping theory, we develop a multi-label BERTurk classifier to detect three coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-making) across four theoretically motivated crisis phases. BERTurk achieves a macro F1 of 0.693, substantially outperforming a zero-shot mDeBERTa baseline (macro F1 = 0.324). Applied to the full corpus, the classifier reveals a clear temporal trajectory: problem-focused coping dominates the urgency phase and declines sharply, emotion-focused coping rises and stabilizes, and meaning-making increases monotonically. Anger correlates most strongly with meaning-making (Spearman r = 0.387), suggesting it functions as a mobilizing force toward blame attribution rather than practical action. These findings demonstrate that coping theory can be reliably operationalized in real-world digital crisis data and that doing so can help humanitarian organizations tailor their responses to where a population actually is.

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

JetParticle-JEPA: An Efficient Self-Supervised Representation Learning method for Jet Tagging in High-Energy Physics

arXiv:2606.14813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jet tagging at the Large Hadron Collider increasingly relies on deep learning models trained on massive simulated datasets, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness to detector mismodeling. We introduce JetParticle-JEPA (JP-JEPA), a self-supervised Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture that learns physically meaningful jet representations directly from continuous particle clouds without tokenization or reconstruction of raw inputs. Built on a Particle Transformer backbone, JP-JEPA predicts latent representations of masked particles while preserving fine-grained kinematic correlations. On the JetClass benchmark, JP-JEPA achieves performance comparable to fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the full dataset, surpasses supervised baselines in low-label regimes, and significantly outperforms existing SSL approaches. On Top Quark and Quark-Gluon Tagging benchmarks, it remains on par with supervised methods. The learned representations also exhibit strong robustness to missing detector information and improved uncertainty behavior, highlighting JP-JEPA as a promising foundation-model framework for robust and data-efficient jet physics at the LHC.

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

On the Variance of Temporal Difference Learning and its Reduction Using Control Variates

arXiv:2606.20357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the variance of temporal difference (TD) learning using the phased setting with tabular representation, and show that one of the mechanisms behind its ability to reduce variance is by effectively aggregating over a larger number of independent trajectories. Based on this insight, we demonstrate that (1) the variance of TD is asymptotically bounded from above by Monte Carlo (MC) estimators, and (2) shorter horizon updates incurs less variance for a fixed number of samples. Beyond TD, we show that Direct Advantage Estimation (DAE), a method for estimating the advantage function, can be seen as a type of regression-adjusted control variate, which achieves a tighter bound on the variance compared to TD in the large-sample limit. Finally, we numerically illustrate the behaviors of these estimators with carefully designed environments.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

Authors:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

R2BC: Multi-Agent Imitation Learning from Single-Agent Demonstrations

arXiv:2510.18085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged synchronized demonstrations across four multi-agent simulated tasks. Finally, we deploy R2BC on two physical robot tasks trained using real human demonstrations.

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

Are Neuro-Inspired Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models Resilient to Membership Inference Privacy Leakage?

In the age of agentic AI, the growing deployment of multi-modal models (MMs) has introduced new attack vectors that can leak sensitive training data in MMs, causing privacy leakage. This paper investigates a black-box privacy attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA) on multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs). State-of-the-art research analyzes privacy attacks primarily to unimodal AI-ML systems, while recent studies indicate MMs can also be vulnerable to privacy attacks. While researchers have demonstrated that biologically inspired neural network representations can improve unimodal model resilience against adversarial attacks, it remains unexplored whether neuro-inspired MMs are resilient against privacy attacks. In this work, we introduce a systematic neuroscience-inspired topological regularization (tau) framework to analyze MM VLMs resilience against image-text-based inference privacy attacks. We examine this phenomenon using three VLMs: BLIP, PaliGemma 2, and ViT-GPT2, across three benchmark datasets: COCO, CC3M, and NoCaps. Our experiments compare the resilience of baseline and neuro VLMs (with topological regularization), where the tau > 0 configuration defines the NEURO variant of VLM. Our results on the BLIP model using the COCO dataset illustrate that MIA attack success in NEURO VLMs drops by 24% mean ROC-AUC, while achieving similar model utility (similarities between generated and reference captions) in terms of MPNet and ROUGE-2 metrics. This shows neuro VLMs are comparatively more resilient against privacy attacks, while not significantly compromising model utility. Our extensive evaluation with PaliGemma 2 and ViT-GPT2 models, on two additional datasets: CC3M and NoCaps, further validates the consistency of the findings. This work contributes to the growing understanding of privacy risks in MMs and provides evidence on neuro VLMs privacy threat resilience.

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

From Content to Knowledge: Lightning Fast Long-Video Understanding with Neural Knowledge Representations

We propose a new paradigm for long video understanding by treating a long video as a Neural Knowledge Representation (NKR). NKR represents video contents neither as a stream of tokens nor pre-organized databases, but as an individual small portion of network weights attached to the VLM backbone. The NKR weights are optimized to encapsulate the video's semantic content via a novel Agentic Knowledge Distillation (AKD) process, where an agent automatically synthesizes dense descriptions and question-answer pairs to distill the video's knowledge into the NKR. While AKD serves as a comprehensive, one-time encoding phase, the resulting NKR transforms the video into a portable, reusable asset. At inference, the lightweight NKR is mounted onto a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM), enabling direct, query-based understanding without reloading or re-encoding the original video. This approach decouples video length from inference cost, offering high amortized efficiency for multi-turn video understanding. Experiments on the LVBench benchmark show our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while reducing end-to-end latency by over two orders of magnitude, opening new possibilities for interactive long-video understanding.

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

CMIP-Forge: An Agentic System that Retrieves, Computes, and Self-Reviews Climate Science

arXiv:2606.17076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.

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

PowerOPD: Stabilizing On-Policy Distillation with Bounded Power Transformation

arXiv:2606.17199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard on-policy distillation (OPD) for large language models estimates the reverse-KL objective using student-sampled tokens, yielding an unbiased single-sample Monte Carlo estimator that avoids vocabulary-wide computation. However, we show that this estimator suffers from severe training pathologies in practice: sample inefficiency, unstable generation dynamics, and a substantial performance gap compared to exact full-vocabulary OPD. Reward-level diagnosis traces these pathologies to the log-ratio reward, which is unbounded by construction, producing extremely high-variance gradients concentrated at early positions and persisting throughout training; standard post-hoc scaling fail as they operate only after this distortion occurs. To solve this problem, we propose PowerOPD: a family of natively bounded, sign-consistent rewards from the Box-Cox power transformation, parameterized by alpha > 0, of which the log-ratio is the degenerate alpha -> 0 limit. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks and four Qwen3 teacher-student pairs, PowerOPD achieves benchmark-averaged Avg@8/Pass@8 gains of up to +6.37/+5.71 over vanilla OPD, +3.01/+3.54 over post-hoc stabilization, and +2.59/+8.90 over full-vocabulary OPD, while reducing wall-clock time by 59.2% and peak GPU memory by 23.1%. Larger alpha generally improves accuracy, consistently shortens responses, and keeps gradient norms more than 3,000x smaller than vanilla OPD.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

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

FlexMS: A Unified Public Benchmark for Molecule Tandem Mass Spectrum Prediction

arXiv:2602.22822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is central to small molecule identification, but current deep learning systems for spectrum prediction still remain difficult to evaluate and deploy in practice. While novel architectures constantly claim state-of-the-art performance, inconsistent metadata conditioning and entangled preprocessing pipelines hinder fair architectural comparisons. Besides, existing evaluations are often restricted to curated datasets, failing to capture the heterogeneity and cross-domain shifts of real-world metabolomics. Furthermore, current benchmarks lack difficulty-aware diagnostics and leave blind to how models behave under specific compute or data constraints. To address this, we present FlexMS, a modular public-data benchmark framework that standardizes MS/MS prediction across public resources while keeping molecular encoders, metadata conditioning, predictor heads, and downstream retrieval under one protocol. FlexMS establishes a fair evaluation playground which significantly lowers the barrier for integrating new predictive tools. Rather than solely optimizing for average scores, FlexMS augments aggregate accuracy with difficulty-aware diagnostics, providing actionable guidance on model selection across different compute constraints, data scales, and downstream retrieval objectives. Ultimately, FlexMS provides the community with a reproducible standard to identify which algorithmic conclusions are stable and which operating points are most viable in practice.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MODF-SIR: A Multi-agent Omni-modal Distilled Framework for Social Intelligence Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a multi-agent collaborative framework built upon a lightweight Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), specifically designed for social intelligence reasoning. A key feature of our approach is that both the training and inference phases are augmented via knowledge distillation. Within this architecture, multi-modal data pertinent to social intelligence is precisely localized. Furthermore, relevant long-tail events are identified, extracted, and rendered as formatted, explicit text. This formatting strategy prevents critical long-tail information from being overshadowed by head events and environmental noise during the tokenization process. Specifically, we integrate Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) across the entire reasoning pipeline, encompassing the extraction and representation of long-tail events, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and self-reflection. This TTA mechanism is also distillation-enhanced, utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the foundation model exclusively for instance-level reasoning. Extensive evaluations against various open-source and proprietary AI models across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With around 30% of training data from IntentTrain, we achieve state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/eeee-sys/MODF-SIR, demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR, LoRA is available at https://huggingface.co/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR and the dataset for training router is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Harry-1234/IntentRouterTrain.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moving Beyond Diversity: Visual Token Pruning as Subspace Reconstruction for Efficient VLMs

Despite their remarkable performance, Vision Language Models (VLMs) incur substantial computational overhead due to the large number of visual tokens. While diversity maximization has become a dominant strategy for token reduction, existing methods rely on cosine-based normalized similarity that discards magnitude information, failing to faithfully approximate the original feature representation and leading to suboptimal performance, particularly on compositional multi-skill reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce SPARE, a subspace reconstruction method that reformulates token pruning as a column subset selection problem and explicitly minimizes reconstruction error. By iteratively selecting tokens with large projection residuals, SPARE performs reconstruction-driven pruning beyond angular diversity. Moreover, we reveal a counterintuitive anti-relevance phenomenon: tokens with lower image-text relevance score can better preserve contextual information. Based on this finding, we incorporate anti-relevance into SPARE as an additional selection criterion to promote context-aware token selection. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that SPARE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with strong gains on compositional tasks. When applied to LLaVA, SPARE removes up to 94% of visual tokens while retaining 95% of the baseline performance, all in a fully training-free manner.

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

Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression

arXiv:2606.13052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast, high-fidelity two-qubit gates are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Tunable coupler architectures provide a flexible approach for implementing entangling gates through flux control with large on-off ratios, but fast flux modulation can induce diabatic transitions and population leakage to non-computational states, limiting gate performance. Here we present an analytical flux control method enabling derivative removal by adiabatic gate ($\Phi$-DRAG) for suppressing leakage in flux tunable two-qubit gates. We show that $\Phi$-DRAG differs fundamentally from conventional microwave implementations and derive modified flux modulation protocols that suppress leakage below $10^{-4}$ for fast entangling gates. The method remains effective across a range of asymmetry between qubit anharmonicities and different circuit parameters, enabling high-fidelity two-qubit gates within the fifteen nanosecond range.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Brownian Kernel Ladders

arXiv:2606.15812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constructing mathematically tractable function spaces that capture hierarchical compositional representations remains a central challenge in statistical learning theory. We introduce Brownian kernel ladders (BKLs), a recursively defined hierarchy of integral reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces generated through Brownian-kernel integral constructions. Starting from linear functionals, each layer is obtained by integrating Brownian kernels over probability measures supported on subsets of the previous layer, yielding a recursive function-space model in which depth is encoded directly through the hierarchy. Based on this framework, we define canonical BKL spaces together with an associated complexity functional. We establish several analytical and statistical properties of these spaces. In particular, we show that BKL spaces form quasi-Banach spaces, satisfy depth-dependent Hölder regularity estimates, and exhibit strict monotonicity with respect to depth. We further prove existence results for regularized empirical risk minimization and derive Gaussian complexity bounds that remain uniformly controlled with respect to both the ambient dimension and the hierarchy depth. A key ingredient of the analysis is a combinatorial proof technique based on recursive subset decompositions and Brownian-kernel threshold representations. These estimates yield excess-risk guarantees of near-parametric order for regularized empirical risk minimization over BKL spaces. Our results provide a mathematically tractable hierarchical function-space framework for studying compositional representations in deep learning.