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

Unclonable Encryption in the Haar Random Oracle Model

arXiv:2603.11437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We construct unclonable encryption (UE) in the Haar random oracle model, where all parties have query access to $U,U^\dagger,U^*,U^T$ for a Haar random unitary $U$. Our scheme satisfies the standard notion of unclonable indistinguishability security, supports reuse of the secret key, and can encrypt arbitrary-length messages. That is, we give the first evidence that (reusable) UE, which requires computational assumptions, exists in "microcrypt", a world where one-way functions may not exist. As one of our central technical contributions, we build on the recently introduced path recording framework to prove a natural ``unitary reprogramming lemma'', which may be of independent interest.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A risk-of-contagion index using a Bayesian based model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Mexico

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity and reporting delays complicated epidemic surveillance and decision-making in Mexico. We calibrated textit{covidestim}, a Bayesian nowcasting model, to estimate the total SARS-CoV-2 infections from reported cases and deaths using Mexican surveillance data. Disease-progression distribution priors were calibrated using Mexico City records and validated through comparisons with national seroprevalence surveys, hospitalization data, and annual reported severe-case rates across all states. Using the reconstructed estimates of active infections, we implemented an event-based risk framework that quantifies the probability of encountering at least one infectious individual in gatherings of different sizes. This probability was subsequently translated into a four-level epidemiological traffic-light indicator and computed at both state and municipality levels. The resulting estimates revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity that is obscured by state-level aggregation, particularly in states with marked differences between urban and rural municipalities. To evaluate consistency with public-health indicators, we compared the proposed risk classification with the official Mexican epidemiological traffic-light system, considering interpretable gathering sizes relevant to public-health decision making. Weekly reports derived from this framework were delivered to policymakers in the State of Queretaro in Mexico, as an anticipation tool for school reopening and public-space management. This demonstrates that this Bayesian reconstruction of infections combined with event-based risk metrics can provide an interpretable and generalizable municipality-level complement to routine surveillance systems, particularly in regions with limited testing capacity and heterogeneous local transmission dynamics.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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

Seed-Guided Semi-Supervised Clustering by A-Contrario Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.18833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a semi-supervised clustering framework grounded in the statistical duality between grouping principles and anomaly detection. We address the challenge of robust cluster definition in noisy environments – a task where partitioning algorithms often over-assign outliers and density-based methods remain sensitive to heuristic global parameters. Drawing on a-contrario statistical reasoning and Gestalt proximity principles, we define a cluster as a maximal subset of data points containing no anomalies relative to a null hypothesis of uniform randomness. Central to this approach is the Perception algorithm, which utilises a principled expectation-based threshold ($\mathbb{E} < 1$) to identify outliers without manual parameter tuning. By treating clustering as the dual of anomaly detection, we employ an iterative ``clustering-by-exclusion'' mechanism. The algorithm is seed-guided, leveraging minimal user-provided labels to initialise robust cluster medians and form initial groups, which are subsequently expanded by admitting non-anomalous points. This approach naturally isolates fringe points, isolated noise, and emerging unknown clusters. We evaluate the method on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, including image and text datasets represented through raw, linear-reduced, and neighbourhood-preserving embeddings. Results demonstrate that with as few as 10–30 seeds per cluster, the proposed method achieves competitive and often very strong performance under a practical low-tuning benchmarking protocol, while maintaining linear scalability with respect to both observations and dimensionality for a fixed number of seeded clusters and iterations.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Learning Geometric Representations from Videos for Spatial Intelligent Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05833v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at 2D semantic understanding but lack intrinsic 3D awareness, resulting in representations that fail to maintain geometric and spatial consistency across video frames. Given the scarcity of large-scale 3D data, we present GeoVR, a novel framework that learns geometric representations using purely 2D video sequences. This approach effectively restructures the semantic latent space within MLLMs to unlock spatial intelligence. Rather than employing superficial feature mixing, GeoVR reshapes the internal representations of the MLLM by distilling geometry knowledge from pre-trained 3D foundation models. This is accomplished through a multi-objective learning strategy driven by four complementary geometric targets: (1) estimating inter-frame camera poses to embed varying viewpoint dynamics, (2) regressing dense depth maps to anchor physical distances, (3) predicting a metric scale factor for real-world calibration, and (4) distilling multi-scale 3D features to align the intermediate feature space. Guided by these explicit physical and geometric constraints, the model's internal representations naturally develop strong 3D awareness. Extensive experiments on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GeoVR achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a new paradigm for endowing foundation models with spatial intelligence.

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

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL.

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

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

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

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ATV-Net: Adaptive Triple-View Network with Dynamic Feature Fusion

Recent advances in semantic segmentation rely heavily on attention-based and transformer-style architectures that, while accurate, introduce considerable architectural complexity and computational cost. This paper asks whether a compact CNN-based segmentation head can remain competitive by adaptively selecting useful receptive-field evidence. We propose ATV-Net, an Adaptive Triple-View Network that attaches a lightweight head to a conventional backbone. The head organizes three complementary views – point-wise, neighborhood-level, and enlarged context – and fuses them through an Adaptive Decision Gate that generates image-dependent weights from global feature statistics. This allows the model to emphasize different receptive-field responses according to scene content, without dense attention or multi-scale aggregation. Experiments on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 show that ATV-Net achieves 80.31% mIoU on Cityscapes with ResNet-101 and 80.90% with ConvNeXt-Tiny, and 86.7% and 88.5% mIoU on Pascal VOC 2012, respectively, while requiring fewer GFLOPs than representative context-aggregation and attention-based heads. The results indicate that adaptive receptive-field selection remains a practical and effective design choice for CNN-based semantic segmentation.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.14579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When applying Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for GUI Grounding, rollouts are sampled from a single screenshot view; groups often become either all failures on difficult instances or all successes on easy ones, yielding no useful relative advantage. We propose VISTA (View-Consistent Self-Verified Training), a GRPO-based training framework that constructs each comparison group from multiple target-preserving views of the same GUI instance.Each view is generated by a crop that keeps the target element visible and remaps its box exactly, so model rollouts are compared across semantically equivalent but geometrically different inputs. To stabilize short coordinate generation without turning reinforcement learning into unconditional imitation, VISTA further adds a self-verified cross-view anchor: an oracle answer optimized with an advantage-weighted loss, excluded from the group baseline and activated only when the model has produced a maximum-reward rollout. Across five GUI-grounding benchmarks and multiple Qwen backbones, VISTA consistently improves grounding accuracy.On ScreenSpot-Pro, it raises Qwen3-VL 4B/8B/30B-A3B from 55.5/52.7/53.7 to 63.4/65.8/67.0. Robustness analyses further show higher worst-view accuracy and lower prediction flip rates.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Evaluation of analysis modes for RNA coexpression in single-cell and bulk tissue

Coexpression of transcripts presents the most common means of computational inference of transcription factor regulation, and is often combined with other data types to infer regulatory networks. With the growing popularity of single-cell approaches, there are questions about how best to extract coexpression information from the data. Recently we reported a simulation study that explored the differences among coexpression performed at different levels: across single cells (xCell, per cell type), across subjects from pseudobulked single-cell data (xSubject, per cell type), or across subjects using bulk tissue samples (xBulk). Here we test predictions made by those models using real data. We consider both preservation (consistency of coexpression findings across different levels of analysis of the same data) and replicability across independent studies, as well as biological interpretability. We find that preservation across levels is limited, indicating the choice of analysis level will affect outcomes. We show that xCell coexpression is more replicable across studies compared to xSubject. xBulk coexpression is dominated by patterns driven by variability in cellular composition and fails to capture much coexpression that is reliably detected at finer resolutions. While all modes of analysis exhibit some enrichment for known regulatory relationships, it was highest with the xCell mode. Finally, we present a case study of the effect of analysis modes on a schizophrenia-associated pattern, reinforcing the importance of analytic choices in the interpretation and replicability of coexpression analyses. Together with our modeling study, this work emphasizes the importance of understanding sources of expression covariation as they relate to the goals of the analysis, and recommend single-cell-based data with biological replicates should be the focus of attempts to infer dynamic regulatory interactions that are more likely to be replicable by others.

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

CaReTS: A Multi-Task Framework Unifying Classification and Regression for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2511.09789v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in deep forecasting models have achieved remarkable performance, yet most approaches still struggle to provide both accurate predictions and interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. This paper proposes CaReTS, a novel multi-task learning framework that combines classification and regression tasks for multi-step time series forecasting problems. The framework adopts a dual-stream architecture, where a classification branch learns the stepwise trend into the future, while a regression branch estimates the corresponding deviations from the latest observation of the target variable. The dual-stream design provides more interpretable predictions by disentangling macro-level trends from micro-level deviations in the target variable. To enable effective learning in output prediction, deviation estimation, and trend classification, we design a multi-task loss with uncertainty-aware weighting to adaptively balance the contribution of each task. Furthermore, four variants (CaReTS1–4) are instantiated under this framework to incorporate mainstream temporal modelling encoders, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and Transformers. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CaReTS outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in forecasting accuracy, while achieving higher trend classification performance.

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

Guidelines for the Annotation and Visualization of Legal Argumentation Structures in Chinese Judicial Decisions

This Guideline presents a systematic and operationalizable annotation framework for representing legal argumentation structures in judicial decisions. Grounded in theories of legal reasoning and argumentation, the framework aims to reveal the logical organization of judicial reasoning and provide a reliable foundation for computational analysis. At the element level, the Guideline distinguishes between the non-propositional layer and the propositional layer. The non-propositional layer consists of two elements: Issue and Non-argumentative Component. At the propositional level, the Guideline defines four proposition types: General Normative Judgment, Particular Normative Judgment, General Factual Judgment, and Particular Factual Judgment. At the relational level, five relation types are defined to represent argumentative structures: Support, Attack, Joint, Match, and Identity. These relations capture positive and negative argumentative connections, conjunctive reasoning structures, correspondences between legal norms and case facts, and identity or semantic equivalence between propositions. The Guideline further specifies formal representation rules and visualization conventions for both basic and nested structures, enabling consistent visualization of complex argumentation patterns. In addition, it establishes a standardized annotation workflow and consistency control mechanisms to ensure the reproducibility and reliability of annotated data. By providing a clear conceptual model, formal representation rules, and practical annotation procedures, this Guideline supports large-scale analysis of judicial reasoning and future research in legal argument mining, computational modeling of legal reasoning, and AI-assisted legal analysis.

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

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

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

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $\alpha$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $\alpha/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-\alpha/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-\alpha$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

UtVAA: Ultra-tiny Vision Transformer with Affix Attention for Mobile Image Classification

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong representation capability in image classification. However, their quadratic self-attention complexity and large parameter counts limit deployment on resource-constrained mobile and edge devices. This paper introduces UtVAA, an ultra-tiny Vision Transformer architecture designed for efficient visual recognition under strict computational budgets. It incorporates a novel Affix Attention block that combines depthwise-pointwise local feature extraction, linear self-attention, coordinate attention for spatial dependency modelling, and a lightweight ternary fusion strategy to integrate local and global representations. In addition, Dilated Bottleneck blocks expand the receptive field using dilated depthwise separable convolutions while maintaining low FLOPs and stable optimisation through residual connections. UtVAA is implemented in scalable Tiny, Medium, and Large variants, with the smallest model containing 204.67K parameters and 53.95M FLOPs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, PlantVillage-Tomato and SLIF-Tomato datasets show that UtVAA achieves competitive accuracy within a sub-million-parameter regime. Overall, the results demonstrate that transformer-based vision models can be redesigned into ultra-tiny architectures without significant loss in discriminative performance, making UtVAA suitable for mobile and edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/romiyal/UtVAA

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

24.
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.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.