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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

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

FreoStream:Enhancing Stream Guardrails via Future-Aware Reasoning and Safety-Aligned Optimization

arXiv:2606.13737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stream guardrails enable token-level safety detection before full responses are generated. However, they often make overly conservative judgements and block those sensitive but safe tokens, which is known as over-refusal. Due to lack of full context, they also fail to detect implicitly harmful content from jailbreaking. To address these challenges, we propose FreoStream, a novel streaming guardrail framework. Specifically, FreoStream fine-tunes a LoRA module to perform Future-Aware Reasoning when the base guardrail detects unsafe tokens. The reasoning process follows a Future-Reason-Judge paradigm: predict the future, reason about the full context and give the final judgement. This design can effectively reduce over-refusal by incorporating the future information. Moreover, we introduce the Safety-Aligned Optimization module that extracts the safety-aligned component from the reasoning gradients to update the base guardrail model, thereby enhancing streaming safety detection. Extensive experiments on various safety benchmarks demonstrate that FreoStream achieves lower over-refusal rates and better jailbreak defense compared to existing streaming guardrails.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

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

Bridging Passive and Active: Enhancing Conversation Starter Recommendation via Active Expression Modeling

Large Language Model (LLM)-driven conversational search is shifting information retrieval from reactive keyword matching to proactive, open-ended dialogues. In this context, Conversation Starters are widely deployed to provide personalized query recommendations that help users initiate dialogues. Conventionally, recommending these starters relies on a closed "exposure-click" loop. Yet, this feedback loop mechanism traps the system in an echo chamber where, compounded by data sparsity, it fails to capture the dynamic nature of conversational search intents shaped by the open world. As a result, the system skews towards popular but generic suggestions. In this work, we uncover an untapped paradigm shift to shatter this harmful feedback loop: harnessing user "free will" through active user expressions. Unlike traditional recommendations, conversational search empowers users to bypass menus entirely through manually typed queries. The open-world intents in active queries hold the key to breaking this loop. However, incorporating them is non-trivial: (1) there exists an inherent distribution shift between active queries and formulated starters. (2) Furthermore, the "non-ID-able" nature of open text renders traditional item-based popularity statistics ineffective for large-scale industrial streaming training. To this end, we propose Passive-Active Bridge (PA-Bridge), a novel framework that employs an adversarial distribution aligner to bridge the distributional gap between passively recommended starters and active expressions. Moreover, we introduce a semantic discretizer to enable the deployment of popularity debiasing algorithms. Online A/B tests on our platform, demonstrate that PA-Bridge significantly boosts the Feature Penetration Rate by 0.54% and User Active Days by 0.04%.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

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

Context-Aware Multimodal Claim Verification in Spoken Dialogues

Every day, millions absorb claims from podcasts and streams that no fact-checker ever sees. Spoken misinformation is built through conversation, where credibility comes not from facts alone but from how claims are framed, reinforced, or left unchallenged across turns. Yet fact-checking has focused on isolated text, leaving dialogue audio under-studied. We introduce MAD2, a new Multi-turn Audio Dialogues benchmark for spoken claim verification, containing 1,000 two-speaker dialogues with 3,368 check-worthy claims and approximately 10 hours of audio, and propose calibrated multimodal fusion of a context-aware audio encoder and a dialogue-aware text model. Across settings, adding dialogue context improves verification, but the gains depend on scenario type. Using only preceding context often matches offline performance, supporting live-moderation settings, and audio contributes most when transcript-based models are destabilized by additional context. Overall, conversational structure matters more for verification than misinformation framing.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Impossibility of superluminal signalling rules out causal loops in conical spacetimes

arXiv:2606.20476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In PRL 129, 110401 it was shown that it is theoretically possible to have operationally detectable causal loops without violating the principle of no superluminal signalling (NSS) in (1+1)-Minkowski spacetime. Whether or not such causal loops are also possible in $d > 1$ spatial dimensions, has remained a key open question. We resolve this question by showing that in a wide class of "conical" spacetimes, including Minkowski with d > 1, NSS does rule out all operationally detectable causal loops, in classical, quantum and post-quantum theories. This establishes that the relationship between the relativistic principles of NSS and no causal loops depends inherently on the geometry of spacetime.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

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

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

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

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

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

An Adaptive Data cleaning Framework for Noisy Label Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks given large annotated datasets. In real-world applications, however, labels are often corrupted by ambiguity, human error, or dynamic environments. Over-parameterized DNNs easily memorize these noisy labels during training, degrading model accuracy and generalization. Existing data-cleaning and sample-selection strategies often rely on manually specified thresholds, prior knowledge of the noise ratio, or a single metric (either learning dynamics or geometric structure), making them unstable in complex data regimes. This paper proposes a self-adaptive data-cleaning framework that integrates local, global, and learning dynamics cues for robust noisy-label detection. Samples are mapped into a unified low-dimensional feature space through a modular feature concatenation paradigm. We provide two instantiations: a 2D metric integrating class-adaptive KNN-based local disagreement with k-means-based global centroid distance, and a 3D multi-metric that additionally incorporates a z-normalized score. Unlike conventional 1D Gaussian Mixture Models applied to a single scalar metric, our framework performs multi-metric clustering on the feature space to adaptively partition samples into clean-dominant and noise-dominant components without requiring manual thresholds or noise priors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and ImageNet-100 with 5% to 40% symmetric label noise show high recall across settings, including near-perfect recall (>=98%) on ImageNet-100 at 40% noise. Subsequent training yields accuracy gains across evaluated settings, especially under severe corruption on ImageNet-100. These findings suggest that multi-metric integration provides a threshold-free, practical, and low-tuning strategy for noisy label detection.

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

Beyond Tokenization: Direct Timestep Embedding and Contrastive Alignment for Time-Series Question Answering

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have given rise to time-series question answering (TSQA), which formulates time-series analysis as natural-language question answering. However, directly feeding raw numerical series into LLMs suffers from a tokenization bottleneck: Byte Pair Encoding fragments continuous values into unstable tokens whose embeddings lack meaningful metric structure, resulting in the loss of magnitude, scale, and trend information. Prior methods use patch-based encoders that split the series into fixed windows, locking in one granularity that breaks patterns and hides exact timesteps, through a separate module that rarely transfers across datasets with different lengths or sampling rates. To address this challenge, we propose CADE (Contrastive Alignment with Direct Embedding), a novel framework for TSQA built upon two key components: direct timestep embedding and semantic alignment. The proposed framework maps each timestep directly into the LLM embedding space through a point-wise linear encoder and MLP projector, preserving exact index-level access while eliminating the need for patching and padding. To further bridge the semantic gap between time-series and language representations, we introduce a novel one-directional supervised contrastive loss that aligns time-series embeddings with frozen class-name text anchors. Experimental results on the public Time-MQA benchmark demonstrate that our framework consistently improves performance across six TSQA tasks, outperforming both open-source and proprietary LLM baselines.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

arXiv:2606.11522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

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

Clustering and Pruning in Causal Data Fusion

arXiv:2505.15215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data fusion, the process of combining observational and experimental data, can enable the identification of causal effects that would otherwise remain non-identifiable. Although identification algorithms have been developed for specific scenarios, do-calculus remains the only general-purpose tool for causal data fusion, particularly when variables are present in some data sources but not others. However, approaches based on do-calculus may encounter computational challenges as the number of variables increases and the causal graph grows in complexity. Consequently, there exists a need to reduce the size of such models while preserving the essential features. For this purpose, we propose pruning (removing unnecessary variables) and clustering (combining variables) as preprocessing operations for causal data fusion. We generalize earlier results on a single data source and derive conditions for applying pruning and clustering in the case of multiple data sources. We give sufficient conditions for inferring the identifiability or non-identifiability of a causal effect in a larger graph based on a smaller graph and show how to obtain the corresponding identifying functional for identifiable causal effects. Examples from epidemiology and social science demonstrate the use of the results.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

String dynamics of a (2+1)D U(1) quantum link model on a digital quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The (2+1)D U(1) pure gauge theory always exists in the confining phase, with strings of non-zero string tension giving a characteristic linear potential between static charges. This makes it a useful testing ground for quantum computing methods designed to study string dynamics of confining gauge theories. Here we implement a minimal U(1) quantum link model on a quantum computer with qubit degrees of freedom representing the dual height variables of the model. This facilitates an efficient realization of plaquette interactions and enables effective calculations of real-time dynamics that are inaccessible to traditional quantum Monte Carlo. A specifically tailored lattice geometry is chosen to match the heavy-hexagonal geometry of the IBM quantum hardware used here, minimizing non-adjacent qubit interactions. By performing quantum quenches from a simple initial string state, we probe the transverse quantum fluctuations of the string before it thermalizes. Our experimental results from digital quantum simulations, with up to 112 qubits, show good agreement with reference tensor-network calculations at short times and with thermal averages at long times. Near the phase transition, the quench dynamics exhibit large fluctuations of the initial string that extend across both spatial dimensions of the lattice. Nonetheless, our error-mitigated estimators from the quantum hardware also give accurate predictions in that regime, with noise-induced violations of local gauge symmetries comparable to finite-bond-dimension tensor-network results.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Deep Generative Model for Resting-State EEG Synthesis and Transferable Representation Learning

arXiv:2503.02636v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resting-state EEG provides a non-invasive view of spontaneous brain activity, but extracting meaningful patterns is often limited by scarce high-quality data and reliance on manually engineered features. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can synthesize neural signals and learn transferable representations directly from raw data, a dual capability that remains underexplored in EEG research. Here, we introduce REST-GAN, a GAN-based framework for resting-state EEG that combines adversarial training with an auxiliary self-supervised reconstruction objective to support signal synthesis and unsupervised feature extraction. Although trained only on raw time-domain signals, without explicit frequency-domain or sensor-topographic supervision, the generated time series reproduced key temporal, spectral, and connectivity properties of real EEG. In band-power feature space, generated samples showed high precision and recall across eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions (EO: 0.91/0.67; EC: 0.87/0.65), while group-average spectral coherence matrices showed low mean absolute differences from real data across frequency bands (~0.01-0.03). The representations learned by the model's critic transferred to independent resting-state demographic classification tasks, outperforming models trained directly on raw EEG and showing competitive performance relative to a recent EEG foundation model, while requiring substantially less training data and computational resources. These findings highlight a computationally efficient, architecture-driven strategy in which generative models serve not only as EEG signal generators, but also as unsupervised feature extractors. This approach may support more data-efficient EEG analysis while reducing reliance on manual feature engineering. The implementation code for REST-GAN is available at: https://github.com/Yeganehfrh/REST-GAN.