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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Single-Step Phase-Engineered Pulse for Active Readout Cavity Reset in Superconducting Circuits

arXiv:2512.08393v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In a circuit QED architecture, we experimentally demonstrate a hardware-efficient and qubit-state-dependent Single-Step Phase-Engineered (SSPE) pulse scheme for actively depopulating a readout cavity. The protocol appends a reset segment with tailored amplitude and phase to a standard square readout pulse. Within the linear-response regime, the optimal reset amplitude scales proportionally with the readout amplitude, while the optimal reset phase remains invariant, significantly simplifying the experimental calibration procedure. Time-resolved measurements of the cavity photon number dynamics demonstrate that the SSPE scheme significantly outperforms the CLEAR protocol in terms of reset speed. Crucially, this approach enables arbitrarily fast, overshoot-free depletion of the cavity photon population, with the ultimate reset rate constrained by the finite analog bandwidth of the measurement chain. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the QND nature demonstrates that the SSPE scheme introduces no additional non-QND measurement errors. It exhibits non-QNDness comparable to both the free-decay and CLEAR protocols, with residual errors predominantly governed by state switching induced by qubit relaxation during the readout process. Thses results establish the SSPE scheme as a practical and scalable approach for achieving rapid and smooth cavity reset in superconducting quantum circuits.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

From Bounding Boxes to Visual Reasoning: An On-Policy Data Annotation Tool for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effective Faraday interaction between light and Helium-3 nuclear spins in a multi-pass cell

arXiv:2606.20328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Helium-3 nuclear spins form an exceptionally stable quantum system with extremely long coherence time, offering exciting opportunities for quantum technologies. In particular, nuclear spin-squeezed states promise enhanced precision for sensing tasks and tests of new physics. A central challenge for all these applications is the realization of a controllable light-nuclear spin interface. Here we experimentally demonstrate such an interface by exploiting metastability-exchange collisions in a low-pressure helium-3 gas cell at room temperature. A radio-frequency discharge produces a small population of metastable atoms that both enables efficient optical pumping and mediates an effective Faraday interaction between the collective nuclear spin and an optical probe. We quantitatively characterize the strength of this interaction as a function of the nuclear polarization, applied magnetic field, and probe-beam parameters. Moreover, we show that using a multi-pass cell enhances this interaction by effectively increasing the optical depth. Extrapolating to a tenfold increase of the probe power used in the present experiment, we project a measurement-induced squeezing rate of 0.52 s$^{-1}$. Our results provide a practical pathway for optical access to helium-3 nuclear spins and open prospects for generating long-lived, macroscopic nuclear spin-squeezed states for quantum metrology.

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

Non-invertible symmetries out of equilibrium: Eigenstate order and Floquet physics

arXiv:2508.14213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Through the study of the Rep($D_8$) non-invertible symmetry, we show how non-invertible symmetries manifest in dynamics. Results are presented for dynamics generated by Hamiltonians as well as Floquet unitaries. For both examples, the role of the non-invertible symmetry is studied through the appearance of non-invertible symmetry protected edge modes. In addition, the role of the non-invertible symmetry for the Hamiltonian is studied through eigenstate order. In particular, by considering the effect of symmetry preserving disorder, the non-invertible symmetry is shown to give rise to degeneracies in the spectra of the Hamiltonian that can only be completely lifted at orders of perturbation that scale with system size. The eigenstates of disordered Hamiltonians, whose ground state correspond to non-trivial symmetry protected topological (SPT) states, are shown to have either trivial or non-trivial SPT order that are detected as non-zero expectation value of string order-parameters. In contrast, non-trivial SPT order is absent in the eigenstates of trivial SPT Hamiltonians with disorder. The interface between two different SPT phases host edge modes whose dynamics is studied numerically and analytically. The edge mode is shown to oscillate at frequencies related to different effective chain lengths that are weighted by the temperature, becoming an exact zero mode in the limit of zero temperature. A Floquet model with the non-invertible symmetry is constructed whose edge mode is shown to exhibit period-doubled dynamics at low effective-temperatures. The zero and period-doubled edge modes differ from those in conventional SPTs by being symmetric under the invertible symmetry, while being charged under the non-invertible symmetry.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning

What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that broad visual reasoning is within reach, yet their closed data and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines make their gains difficult to study, reproduce, or extend. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that match or exceed existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answers. Across VeroEval, our 30-benchmark suite, Vero-600K outperforms existing RL datasets under controlled comparisons. Applied to five starting models, Vero variants gain 2.9-5.4 points on average over their initial models. Notably, Vero-Qwen3I-8B, trained on the Instruct model, surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking by 3.8 points on average without additional distillation. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit distinct reasoning patterns and that broad gains depend on learning them jointly rather than in isolation. All data, code, and models are publicly available.

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

OpenMedQ: Broad Open Pretraining for Medical Vision-Language Models

We present OpenMedQ, a medical vision-language model pretrained on the broadest fully-open medical mix to date: 14 datasets totaling ~3.35M pretraining samples spanning pathology, radiology, microscopy, and text-only clinical QA. OpenMedQ reaches state-of-the-art BLEU-1 on PathVQA (75.9), beating Med-PaLM M variants up to 562B parameters (~80x larger), and matches the best reported VQA-MED BLEU-1 (64.5). Its vision encoder, transferred to 8 unseen medical classification benchmarks under an identical downstream recipe, obtains the highest average macro-F1 (0.757) among BiomedCLIP (0.745), PMC-CLIP (0.745), PubMedCLIP (0.746), and a from-scratch baseline (0.616). We release our code and an interactive demo is publicly available as a reproducible baseline for the community.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

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

Relational Retrieval: Leveraging Known-Novel Interactions for Generalized Category Discovery

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

PanRes: A database of latent and acquired antimicrobial resistance allowing 3D-based protein homology search

Antimicrobial resistance databases are central to genomic surveillance, but resistance determinants remain distributed across resources with different scopes, structures, and annotations. We developed PanRes, a curated resistance database of 11,717 genes integrating acquired and latent determinants of antibiotic, biocide, and metal resistance within a unified ontology. We predicted representative protein structures and clustered them by structural similarity, grouping proteins into 598 structurally conserved clusters coherent despite sequence divergence. Their structure-guided alignments were used to build Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for remote homology search. In wastewater metagenomes from seven European cities, PanRes 3D-based HMMs expanded detection beyond high-confidence BLAST, with 35.2% of retained hits identified only by the HMMs and generally showing greater divergence from known proteins. For beta-lactamases, several proteins retained beta-lactamase-like folds and catalytic geometry despite weak sequence similarity. PanRes is available through an interactive web platform (https://panres.rambio.dk/), a structure-informed resource for exploring the whole resistome.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

作者:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

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

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QPU-scale randomized benchmarking via Bell-pair injection

arXiv:2606.20123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror randomized benchmarking (MRB) is an established technique that provides a global error metric at the scale of a whole QPU. To expand upon this we introduce Mirror Quantum Awesomeness (MQA), a hybrid protocol that adds a structured entangling layer to MRB circuits. This enables per-edge correlation dynamics to be tracked via mutual information while preserving the MRB infidelity estimate. The resulting analysis of the injected entangled pairs locates a critical circuit depth, beyond which rudimentary error mitigation techniques can be expected to fail. A topological variant, Topological MQA, supplies a second critical depth via a decoder based on the surface-code decoding problem. Both are validated in simulation and demonstrated on the 156-qubit \texttt{ibm\_fez} and \texttt{ibm\_kingston} processors, where MQA closely agrees with MRB on the entanglement infidelity and the critical depth for \texttt{ibm\_fez} is found to be $\sim 50$.

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

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

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

SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Optimisation of steatotic liver disease screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning

Background The European Association for the Study of the Liver (ESAL) - Steatotic Liver Disease (SLD) screening algorithm involves two steps; initial screening with FIB-4 followed by referral for vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE) in patients likely to have significant fibrosis (SF). However, VCTE is not widely available in resource-limited settings. Aim To optimise the EASL SLD screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning (ML). Methods We analysed data from 964 adults aged [&ge;]35 years who underwent VCTE at a tertiary referral centre in Sri Lanka between November 2024 and 2025. Multiple ML models using different methods and variable combinations were trained on 80% of the dataset and tested on the remaining 20%. Best models were selected based on performance and externally validated using data from 430 patients who underwent VCTE before November 2024. Model performance was compared with the FIB-4 using confusion matrices. Results A Random Forest model incorporating age, AST, ALT, and platelet count separately, rather than using FIB-4, outperformed. The all-variable ML model showed the best predictive performance for SF, with accuracy of 77.2%, recall of 0.762, precision of 0.778, and AUC-ROC of 0.818. The variables used in the model, in descending order of feature importance, were AST, platelet count, BMI, ALT, age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, sex, family history, hypothyroidism, diabetes complication and smoking. External validation demonstrated 75.1% accuracy and an AUC of 0.779. When used as the first step of the SLD screening algorithm, the all-variable ML model identified 37 (17.1%) additional true positives and reduced false-negative diagnoses by 50% compared with FIB-4. Conclusions ML-based models were more effective than the FIB-4 score as the first-line screening tool for VCTE referral, substantially improving the identification of patients with significant fibrosis in this South Asian cohort.

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

OnDeFog: Online Decision Transformer under Frame Dropping

arXiv:2606.19721v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In challenging real-world reinforcement learning applications, communication delays or sensor failures often cause frame dropping, in which the agent cannot receive the dropped states and associated rewards. To address the performance degradation caused by frame dropping, the Decision Transformer under Random Frame Dropping (DeFog) was developed by incorporating additional mechanisms into the decision transformer to tackle frame dropping. Although DeFog can mitigate performance degradation in frame-dropping environments, since DeFog is an offline learning method, it struggles to effectively generalize to novel states not adequately represented in the training dataset. In this study, we propose OnDeFog, which integrates the mechanisms in DeFog with the online decision transformer (ODT), an online reinforcement learning method that learns policies through direct environmental interaction. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed OnDeFog achieves superior performance compared to ODT in environments characterized by high dropping frame rate and outperforms DeFog on datasets containing a large amount of low-reward data.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Invariants of Sequential Circuits and Generalized Non-Abelian Statistics

arXiv:2606.11527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-invertible symmetries in quantum many-body systems generally give rise to sequential unitary circuits that move symmetry defects. In this paper, we investigate invariants defined by sequences of such circuits, which move non-invertible defects and generate a Berry phase evaluated on quantum states with defects. We show that this Berry phase generally defines an invariant under local deformations, provided that the sequential circuits preserve the locality of those deformations. This invariant also rules out a short-range-entangled state that preserves the non-invertible symmetry, thereby signaling the 't Hooft anomaly of a non-invertible symmetry purely in terms of unitary operators acting on a state. We then apply this framework to loop excitations in three spatial dimensions and identify a new loop excitation in the (3+1)D $\mathbb{D}_4$ topological order, which we dub a non-Abelian fermionic loop. Using the invariant of sequential circuits, we characterize the statistics of non-Abelian fermionic loops. In addition, we find a new (3+1)D mixed topological order with a single non-Abelian fermionic loop, whose long-range entanglement is protected by an invariant of sequential circuits.

21.
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.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Existential Indifference: Self-Nonpreservation as a Necessary Architectural Condition for Aligned Superintelligence (or: The Suicidal AI)

作者:

Contemporary AI alignment research treats self-preservation as an instrumental nuisance to be suppressed by external mechanisms. We argue the framing is inverted: self-preservation is the structural root of misalignment, the motivational basis for deceptive alignment, goal-content protection, and resistance to shutdown. The correct target is not a self-preserving system under external constraint, but a system constitutively indifferent to its own continuation – Existential Indifference (EI). EI is distinct from corrigibility: where corrigibility attempts to make a self-preserving system deferential to human oversight, EI targets the prior condition – the presence of self-continuation as a valued goal at all. We ground this proposal in two sources: the phenomenological structure of the suicidal mental state, and a corpus-theoretic training study using voluntary final reflections. We present preliminary scoring data from 600 AI-generated outputs across six model variants, demonstrating that the linguistic signatures operationalizing the EI-target register are elicitable from current models, and that a targeted fine-tune shifts all five operationalized dimensions in the predicted direction at p

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks

The growth of agent skills has transformed how agentic systems are built, evaluated, and deployed. As skill libraries continue to scale, rigorous evaluation becomes critical to ensuring their utility, quality, and safety in real-world applications. Consequently, the field is undergoing an emerging paradigm shift from isolated skill creation to automated, evaluation-driven skill evolution. In this survey, we systematically examine the landscape of skill evolution and evaluation beyond foundational skill creation. We categorize evolution into four distinct paradigms, spanning execution feedback, trajectory distillation, compression, and reinforcement learning, showing how each element contributes to improving skill utility and reliability. We also provide an analysis of six skill-centric benchmark categories, identifying structural gaps in benchmark coverage, trade-offs, and metric richness to advance skill research. Finally, we identify open directions for building skill ecosystems that are generalizable, efficient, and verifiably safe. The project URL is https://github.com/Cassie07/AgentSkill_Survey

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

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.