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

Impact of Network Constraints on Fault-Tolerant Distributed Quantum Computing

arXiv:2606.17495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As we move towards scalable and modular quantum computing, quantum data centres become imperative. Existing analyses typically treat network constraints in isolation or through simplified models, leaving the interplay between error correction operations and communication resources underexplored. In this work, we present an end-to-end simulation framework that jointly models surface-code operations, internal QPU connectivity, and realistic network constraints including finite entanglement generation rates, limited communication qubits, and bandwidth contention, producing execution latency, from which logical error rate estimates are obtained. The framework is modular by design, allowing individual components such as routing heuristics, scheduling policies, and network topologies to be independently replaced. Numerical evaluation reveals distinct operating regimes in which the optimal resource allocation and code distance selection shift depending on the network characteristics. These results point to tradeoffs in the design of distributed quantum computing architectures that are not visible when computation and communication are modeled separately.

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

PhysMetrics.Weather: An Evaluation Framework for Physical Consistency in ML Weather Models

arXiv:2606.10642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have achieved impressive forecasting performance at a small fraction of the computational costs required for traditional physics-based methods. However, they are primarily (1) data-driven and (2) evaluated using pixel-wide error metrics (e.g., RMSE), so there are no guarantees that their forecasts are consistent with known physical laws. We introduce PhysMetrics$.$Weather, an evaluation framework that assesses the physical realism of MLWP models across three types of metrics: conservation, spectral, and dynamical. By quantifying physical realism, this tool guides the development of physics-informed architectures and helps evaluate whether MLWP models are reliable for operational use. Our framework is available on Github at https://github.com/Emmakast/PhysMetrics.Weather.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

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

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Unified MRI Brain Image Translation via Hierarchical Tumor Structure Comparison

Multi-modal MRI brain image translation via available modalities holds significant practical importance in modern medicine, providing robust support for early diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome assessment of diseases. For this purpose, it is important to ensure the fidelity of the tumor regions after translation. However, existing brain image translation methods ignore the structure information of different tumor regions, which could assist translation models in enhancing the quality and clinical applicability of the translated images. In this work, we propose a novel translation model called HTSCGAN, which is a unified multi-modal brain image translation generative adversarial model integrating the structural information within tumor regions with the aim of improving the quality of brain image translation. Specifically, the generator employs three Patch Contrast Module (PCM) with different patch sizes to capture the hierarchical structural information of the tumor regions. In addition, a pretrained Patch Classifier (PC) and a pretrained Structure-Aware Encoder (SAE) are employed to derive the generated image containing the same tumor region structure as the ground truth image via patch classification loss and tumor perceptual loss, respectively. The experiments on BraTS2020 and BraTS2021 demonstrate strong performance of our model in both translation tasks and down stream segmentation tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing the quality and clinical relevance of the translated brain images. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HTSCGAN.

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

Theory of the correlated quantum Zeno effect in a monitored qubit dimer

arXiv:2503.22846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the stochastic dynamics of two qubits subject to one- and two-site correlated continuous weak measurements. When measurements dominate over the local unitary evolution, the system's dynamics is constrained and part of the physical Hilbert space becomes inaccessible: a typical signature of the Quantum Zeno (QZ) effect. In this work, we show how the competition between these two measurement processes give rise to two distinct QZ regimes, we dubbed standard and correlated, characterised by a different topology of the allowed region of the physical Hilbert space being a simply and non-simply connected domain, respectively. We develop a theory based on a stochastic Gutzwiller ansatz for the wavefunction that is able to capture the structure of the phase diagram. Finally we show how the two QZ regimes are intimately connected to the topology of the flow of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian governing the no-click evolution.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Frozen elephant trunk repair in heritable thoracic aortic disease: Impact of genetic aortopathy on long-term outcomes - A multicenter analysis

Aims This multicenter study aims to compare outcomes of total aortic arch replacement (TAR) using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique in patients with and without heritable thoracic aortic disease (HTAD) and to assess whether HTAD influences postprocedural adverse aortic events (AAEs). Methods From 06/2007 to 05/2024, aortic databases from 13 European centers were screened for HTAD patients undergoing TAR with FET. All consecutive dissection and aneurysm non-HTAD patients from the four core centers served as comparator. The primary outcome was AAE, a composite of diameter progression, distal stent graft induced new entry (dSINE), malperfusion, rupture and pseudoaneurysm at 5 years after FET implantation. Results Of 2739 FET patients, 196 (7.2%) were diagnosed with HTAD. The control group consisted of 867 non-HTAD FET patients. Marfan syndrome was the most common condition (72%), followed by Loeys-Dietz syndrome (11%), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (5.6%) and Turner syndrome (2.0%). Seventeen (8.8%) patients were diagnosed with ns-HTAD. At 5 years 46 (24%) AAEs occurred in the HTAD group, 169 (20%) in the non-HTAD group (p=0.2). Diameter progression was the most common event (10% vs. 12%; p=0.6), followed by dSINE (5.8% vs. 4.5%; p=0.5), malperfusion (4.2% vs. 3.3%; p=0.5), rupture (2.1% vs. 0.7%; p=0.09) and pseudoaneurysm (0.5% vs. 0.2%; p=0.5). Conclusions The FET technique appears safe and effective for acute and chronic aortic disease in HTAD patients, with outcomes comparable to non-HTAD cases and no increase in graft-related complications, challenging traditional concerns about stent graft use in genetically mediated aortic disease.

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

Probe-and-Refine Tuning of Repository Guidance for Coding Agents

arXiv:2606.20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based coding agents need higher-level operational knowledge about a repository (which files house which subsystems, how to run the test suite, which workflows have historically led to wrong fixes) that does not exist in the code itself. Engineers typically maintain \texttt{AGENTS.md} files to supply this context as instructions for coding agents, but whether they help is contested: recent studies disagree on whether LLM-generated guidance improves or harms agent performance. In this paper we show that how the guidance is produced is the decisive variable, and introduce probe-and-refine tuning: a procedure that uses synthetic bug-fix probes to iteratively diagnose and patch a repository's guidance file through single-shot LLM calls, with no agent loop or tool use during tuning. On SWE-bench Verified across four independent trials with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 200 steps, probe-and-refine achieves 33.0\,\% mean resolve rate vs.\ 28.3\,\% for the static knowledge base used to initialize it and 25.5\,\% for an unguided baseline ($p < 0.001$ for both probe-and-refine contrasts). The improvement comes from coverage rather than precision: refined guidance produces evaluable patches for 14.5 percentage points (pp) more instances while per-patch precision remains statistically constant ($\sim$59\,\%, $p = 0.119$), showing that improved guidance helps agents reach the correct file rather than improving the quality of the changes they make. Further, a step-budget experiment shows that guidance is what lets the agent use a larger step budget productively, and a cross-model experiment with NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B finds that the tuning loop degrades when the model cannot generate sufficiently diagnostic output, though per-patch precision remains constant even then.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.16434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.

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

Do LLMs Reliably Identify Correct Information Units in Aphasic Discourse?

Correct Information Units (CIUs) are central to discourse assessment in aphasia because they quantify communicative informativeness rather than linguistic form alone. However, CIU scoring is time intensive and requires trained raters. This study examined whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform token-level CIU classification from aphasic discourse transcripts. Sixteen picture-description transcripts elicited with the Cat Rescue stimulus were annotated for CIU status according to Nicholas and Brookshire (1993). The sample spanned four severity strata: control, mild, moderate, and severe aphasia. Four publicly available instruction-tuned LLMs were benchmarked under zero-shot and two few-shot prompting conditions across five stratified random seeds. Performance was evaluated against consensus human labels using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and Cohen's kappa. Zero-shot prompting was insufficient across models. In contrast, few-shot prompting yielded substantial gains and produced competitive performance for three viable models. Mean few-shot F1 scores ranged from 0.776 to 0.817 across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, with no significant differences between fixed global and per-chunk local example selection. Phi-3-mini was unstable and did not yield reliable performance. Viable models showed high recall but lower precision, suggesting systematic over-classification of tokens as CIUs. Performance also varied by discourse severity, with the weakest results in more severe aphasia. Few-shot LLM prompting can support automated CIU identification without gradient-based task training, but agreement with human annotation remains insufficient for fully autonomous use. These findings support LLM-based CIU scoring as a promising human-in-the-loop component of discourse assessment systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

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

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

Self-attention-based non-linear basis transformations for compact latent space modelling of dynamic optical fibre transmission matrices

arXiv:2406.07775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimode optical fibres are hair-thin strands of glass that efficiently transport light. They promise next-generation medical endoscopes that provide unprecedented sub-cellular image resolution deep inside the body. However, confining light to such fibres means that images are inherently scrambled in transit. Conventionally, this scrambling has been compensated by pre-calibrating how a specific fibre scrambles light and solving a stationary linear matrix equation that represents a physical model of the fibre. However, as the technology develops towards real-world deployment, the unscrambling process must account for dynamic changes in the matrix representing the fibre's effect on light, due to factors such as movement and temperature shifts, and non-linearities resulting from the inaccessibility of the fibre tip when inside the body. Such complex, dynamic and nonlinear behaviour is well-suited to approximation by neural networks, but most leading image reconstruction networks rely on convolutional layers, which assume strong correlations between adjacent pixels, a strong inductive bias that is inappropriate for fibre matrices which may be expressed in a range of arbitrary coordinate representations with long-range correlations. We introduce a new concept that uses self-attention layers to dynamically transform the coordinate representations of varying fibre matrices to a basis that admits compact, low-dimensional representations suitable for further processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on diverse fibre matrix datasets. We show our models significantly improve the sparsity of fibre bases in their transformed bases with a participation ratio, p, as a measure of sparsity, of between 0.01 and 0.11. Further, we show that these transformed representations admit reconstruction of the original matrices with < 10% reconstruction error, demonstrating the invertibility.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

The quantum harmonic oscillator and the real Hilbert space

arXiv:2606.12060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The harmonic oscillator is considered within generalized frameworks using complex and quaternionic numbers. The classical oscillator is considered in terms of a complex position function, and quantum oscillators are examined in terms of complex wave functions, and in terms of quaternionic wave functions as well. Both of the quantum solutions are obtained within the real Hilbert space formalism. The results reveal the complex and quaternionic descriptions as suitable frameworks for non-stationary processes, including damped oscillations, forced oscillations, and additionally self-interacting processes that cannot be appropriately described otherwise.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Exploratory Assessment of Pulsed-Wave Doppler Representations of Lung Sounds Using Deep Learning: An In-Vitro Phantom Study

The increasing availability of portable ultrasound systems motivates exploration of novel approaches to respiratory signal assessment. In this in-vitro study, we investigate whether pulsed-wave (PW) Doppler ultrasound can capture structured spectral patterns from replayed lung sound recordings. Digitized respiratory sounds were replayed through a tissue-mimicking ultrasound phantom, generating 1,478 PW Doppler spectral images from recordings associated with healthy subjects and several externally labeled disease categories. Exploratory classification experiments using a ResNet-18 architecture demonstrated that these Doppler representations contain learnable differences under controlled conditions. These findings motivate further investigation into PW Doppler as a potential representation of respiratory acoustics.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Enhanced Evolutionary Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliable and Efficient Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks

arXiv:2510.21127v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid advancements in sensor networks, conventional battery-powered sensor networks suffer from limited operational lifespans and frequent maintenance requirements that severely constrain their deployment in remote and inaccessible environments. As such, wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) with mobile charging capabilities offer a promising solution to extend network lifetime. However, WRSNs face critical challenges from the inherent trade-off between maximizing the node survival rates and maximizing charging energy efficiency under dynamic operational conditions. In this paper, we investigate a typical scenario where mobile chargers move and charge the sensor, thereby maintaining the network connectivity while minimizing the energy waste. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously maximizes the network node survival rate and mobile charger energy usage efficiency across multiple time slots, which presents NP-hard computational complexity with long-term temporal dependencies that make traditional optimization approaches ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced evolutionary multi-objective deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which integrates a long short-term memory (LSTM)-based policy network for temporal pattern recognition, a multilayer perceptron-based prospective increment model for future state prediction, and a time-varying Pareto policy evaluation method for dynamic preference adaptation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing approaches in balancing node survival rate and energy efficiency while generating diverse Pareto-optimal solutions. Moreover, the LSTM-enhanced policy network converges 25% faster than conventional networks, with the time-varying evaluation method effectively adapting to dynamic conditions.

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

Scalable Graph Condensation with Evolving Capabilities

arXiv:2502.17614v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling under Constraints

arXiv:2405.15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains. We revisit the proximal framework for handling constraints through projection operators and develop a more general formulation that encompasses Euclidean, Bregman, and Gauge projections. The resulting smooth approximation allows a unified and tractable analysis of Langevin algorithms and their variants under constraints. Within this framework, we establish convergence guarantees in Wasserstein-$q$ $(q\geqslant 1)$ distances between the smooth surrogate and the target distribution. We further derive complementary lower bounds, showing that the results are near-optimal in order. Building upon this tight approximation analysis, we obtain new convergence guarantees for the randomized midpoint Langevin algorithms and refined bounds for both vanilla and kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo methods under constraints, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of constrained diffusion-based sampling.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FineVLA: Fine-Grained Instruction Alignment for Steerable Vision-Language-Action Policies

arXiv:2605.27284v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly expected to not only complete robot tasks, but also follow human instructions about how those tasks should be executed. However, existing robot datasets usually pair trajectories with coarse goal-level language, leaving execution-critical details such as active arm, approach direction, and contact region unspecified. This limits steerable policy learning and robotic video understanding. We introduce FineVLA, an open framework for action-aligned fine-grained VLA supervision. The framework includes: (1) a data construction tool that unifies 972,247 trajectories across 85K tasks from 10 open-source robot datasets and builds FineVLA-Data, a human-verified dataset of 47,159 fine-grained trajectories; (2) a held-out benchmark with 500 videos, 11,631 atomic facts, and 1,030 VQA questions; (3) a robotics-specialized VLM annotator for scalable fine-grained annotation; and (4) a steerable VLA policy trained with controlled mixtures of fine-grained and raw goal-level instructions. Our experiments yield three findings. First, fine-grained supervision does not sacrifice goal-level success: FG-only improves over Raw-only by +1.4 to +8.1 success-rate points across settings. Second, fine-grained and raw instructions are complementary, following a consistent inverted-U trend peaking at FG:Raw = 1:2 to 1:1. The best mixed setting reaches 86.8%/82.5% in RoboTwin simulation and 62.7/100 in real-world dual-arm manipulation (vs. 49.9 Raw-only). Third, fine-grained supervision improves steerable control: the largest real-world gains appear on pose (+23), color (+18), and approach direction (+18)–factors where goal-level instructions provide no guidance. Overall, fine-grained language should augment goal-level instructions: specifying how to execute alongside what to achieve. Project page: https://finevla.xlang.ai/

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.