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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HAFMat: Hybrid Priors Guided Adaptive Fusion for Single-Image Human Material Estimation

Physically based rendering (PBR) material estimation is a fundamental appearance decomposition task with broad applications in virtual content creation, relighting, and digital human rendering. However, estimating PBR materials from a single human image remains highly ill-posed, since illumination, geometry, and reflectance are heavily entangled in the observed appearance. To mitigate this ambiguity, we propose HAFMat, a hybrid-prior-guided framework for single-image human material estimation. Our method introduces guidance maps that encode complementary cues, including appearance, body geometry, structure, and prior material predictions from pre-trained models. A key observation is that these guidance cues are heterogeneous: some cues mainly provide texture-level constraints, while others convey higher-level semantic information. To exploit this property, we design a Multi-layer Adaptive Feature Fusion Mechanism, which adaptively fuses guidance features with decoder features at different stages. This design enables texture-dominant and semantic-dominant cues to guide material decoding at appropriate levels, leading to more accurate and physically plausible material estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in material estimation and downstream relighting.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing

arXiv:2606.19984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir computing offers a lightweight framework for forecasting dynamical systems but may struggle to capture long-range dependencies due to limited representational capacity. Conventional reservoir computing recurrently uses trainable reservoirs with hyperparameter sensitivity, while the next-generation reservoir computing removes recurrence at the cost of rapidly growing feature dimensions. Here, we develop Kolmogorov-Arnold Reservoir Computing (KARC), which replaces reservoirs with explicit basis-function expansions inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. We rigorously show that KARC is a lightweight design of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs), preserving the potential expressive capacity of KANs while admitting efficient closed-form training of reservoir computing. At comparable cost, KARC outperforms existing reservoir computing methods on challenging benchmarks including partial differential equations. It can also be integrated with generative diffusion models for text-to-image generation. This work thus establishes a principled bridge between reservoir computing and KANs, enabling efficient and high-fidelity dynamical system forecasting.

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

Gaussian mode coupling of spectrally broadband photons from bulk spontaneous parametric down-conversion: A spatial-spectral mode analysis of fiber coupling

arXiv:2602.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are central to experimental quantum optics and quantum technologies. Their performance is commonly quantified by three metrics: pair-collection probability, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity. In bulk-crystal SPDC, these metrics are known to be mutually constrained, yet the physical origin of the resulting trade-offs is often obscured. We show that these trade-offs originate from the frequency-dependent population of discrete spatial modes in the SPDC emission. By performing a Laguerre-Gauss mode decomposition at each frequency component, we show how spectral-spatial non-separability impacts collection probability, heralding efficiency, and purity. We apply this framework to two widely used quasi-phase-matching configurations: collinear degenerate type-0 and type-II SPDC in periodically poled bulk crystals, and quantify how different phase-matching functions shape the spectral-spatial mode structure. In particular, for type-II SPDC we compare standard periodically poled and aperiodically poled Gaussian phase matching. We experimentally validate some of our theoretical results using spatial- and spectral-projection measurements. This spectral-spatial mode analysis provides a quantitative and predictive framework for understanding and engineering bulk-crystal photon sources, enabling systematic multi-parameter optimization beyond qualitative design guidelines.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual enhancement and 3D representation for underwater scenes: a review

Underwater visual enhancement (UVE) and underwater 3D reconstruction pose significant challenges in computer vision and AI-based tasks due to complex imaging conditions in aquatic environments. Despite the development of numerous enhancement algorithms, a comprehensive and systematic review covering both UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction remains absent. To advance research in these areas, we present an in-depth review from multiple perspectives. First, we introduce the fundamental physical models, highlighting the peculiarities that challenge conventional techniques. We survey advanced methods for visual enhancement and 3D reconstruction specifically designed for underwater scenarios. The paper assesses various approaches from non-learning methods to advanced data-driven techniques, including Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting, discussing their effectiveness in handling underwater distortions. Finally, we conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art UVE and underwater 3D reconstruction algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Finally, we highlight key research directions for future advancements in underwater vision.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Diffusion Residuals for Control-Function Instrumental Variables

arXiv:2606.14636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Control-function instrumental variable estimators need a first-stage residual, not merely a first-stage prediction. High-capacity first stages can interpolate treatment and leave too little residual information for the outcome equation. We study Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), a deterministic graph-diffusion residual extractor for flexible control functions. A-IHF treats treatment as a signal on a graph of first-stage features, uses pilot diffusion to detect large treatment jumps, attenuates conductance across those jumps, and computes the generated control with a sparse graph resolvent. Its observational selection rule uses only $(Z,X)$, combining graph generalized cross-validation, roughness, residualized-treatment relevance, and graph-admissibility filtering. The analysis decomposes error into structural leakage, residual attenuation, and residualized treatment variation, yielding finite-sample bounds, graph-admissibility rates under latent piecewise-smooth geometry, and finite-path selection calibration. Across 54 synthetic benchmark cells with tuned graph, kernel, tree, boosting, series, and neural control-function baselines, guarded observational A-IHF has the lowest average structural-response MSE; the A-IHF family beats the best non-A-IHF baseline in 32 cells. Performance is strongest when the graph captures piecewise-smooth first-stage structure.

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

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Augmenting Dysarthric Speech Severity Assessment with MOS Supervision

arXiv:2606.18645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthria is a speech disorder marked by reduced intelligibility and communicative effectiveness. Automatic utterance-level assessment of dysarthric speech can support scalable speech monitoring and therapy-related analysis. Yet training such systems is bottlenecked by the scarcity of clinically annotated dysarthric speech. This work proposes to augment dysarthric speech assessment using data from speech synthesis evaluations, specifically human-annotated utterances with Mean Opinion Score (MOS) labels from the QualiSpeech corpus. Experiments show that fine-tuning on speech synthesis assessment data consistently improves performance on both intelligibility and naturalness prediction, while joint training yields gains primarily on naturalness. These results suggest that synthesis artifacts and dysarthric speech share perceptual commonalities, and speech synthesis evaluation corpora offer a practical augmentation source that reduces reliance on scarce clinical annotations.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Creating squeezed and non-classical collective motional many-body states through stroboscopic Rydberg dressing

arXiv:2606.17849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realizing conditional quantum operations, e.g., quantum gates, for quantum computing and simulation requires controlled interactions between particles. Often, these interactions depend on the interparticle distance, and accordingly, an uncertainty of the relative particle position may translate into gate infidelities. We consider here a quantum computing platform based on an array of neutral atoms and present a method that allows to reduce the uncertainty of all interatomic distances. Our approach exploits the coupling between atomic motion and stroboscopically excited atomic Rydberg states. It allows to collectively squeeze the modes corresponding to interatomic displacements, thereby reducing distance fluctuations down to a fraction of the motional vacuum state. Furthermore, the method permits the creation of non-classical states with substantial Wigner negativity. These correlated states may allow reducing motional decoherence, increasing gate fidelity, and potentially yield a resource for quantum-enhanced metrology.

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

A Survey on Long-Term Memory Security in LLM Agents: Attacks, Defenses, and Governance Across the Memory Lifecycle

The emergence of writable, cross-session persistent memory in LLM agents introduces a qualitatively different threat landscape from conventional input-centric security concerns, characterized by three properties: persistence, statefulness, and propagation. To systematically characterize this landscape, we propose a Memory Lifecycle Framework that organizes attacks, defenses, and their cross-phase dependencies along two axes: six lifecycle phases (Write, Store, Retrieve, Execute, Share & Propagate, Forget & Rollback) and four security objectives (Integrity, Confidentiality, Availability, Governance). This analysis in turn exposes the need for formal security guarantees at the system level, motivating Verifiable Memory Governance(VMG), a framework of five architectural primitives that specifies what verifiable mechanisms a long-term-memory system must provide to maintain auditable, recoverable control over its memory state. Our analysis indicates that robust Long-Term Memory (LTM) security cannot be retrofitted at retrieval or execution time alone, but must be anchored in storage-time provenance, versioning, and policy-aware retention from the outset.

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

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

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

From Affect Prediction to Affect Forecasting: Evidence for Distinct Information Sources in Longitudinal Text

Modeling dimensional affect in longitudinal text requires distinguishing current affect estimation from future affective change forecasting. Existing approaches often treat each text as an independent observation and apply similar assumptions to both tasks, without testing whether they rely on different information sources. This paper investigates that distinction using longitudinal self-reported ecological essays and feeling-word entries. We propose the Trait–State Affective Prediction (TSAP) framework and its temporal extension E-TSAP for per-text valence and arousal prediction, evaluated on a held-out prediction test set of 1,737 entries from 91 users. We further propose the Affective Change Forecaster Hybrid (ACF-Hybrid) for next-step affective change forecasting, evaluated on a held-out forecasting test set of 46 users. For prediction, E-TSAP achieves composite Pearson correlations of 0.670 for valence and 0.449 for arousal. For forecasting, textual representations perform worse than compact numeric trajectory baselines: the text-inclusive model achieves only r=0.316 for valence and r=0.284 for arousal, whereas a simple prior-state baseline reaches r=0.615 and r=0.670, respectively. ACF-Hybrid, using dimension-specific numeric trajectory features, achieves r=0.659 for valence and $r=0.658$ for arousal. These results show that textual semantics support current affect prediction, whereas future affective change is better captured through prior numeric trajectory dynamics.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

PU-UNet: Stable Multiplicative Interactions for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv:2606.20035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many dense prediction networks rely on additive feature transformations and model higher-order feature interactions only implicitly. Product units provide an explicit mechanism for multiplicative feature modeling, but their logarithmic–exponential formulation can cause numerical instability, which has limited their use in deep dense prediction networks. In this work, we propose Product-Unit U-Net (PU-UNet), a residual U-Net that integrates stable product-unit residual blocks into rich low-resolution stages for medical image segmentation. The proposed formulation combines smooth positivity mapping with log-domain clipping, enabling stable multiplicative feature learning with negligible computational overhead. On ISIC 2018, Kvasir-SEG, and BUSI, PU-UNet achieves Dice scores of 0.942, 0.959, and up to 0.925, respectively. Compared with a matched Residual U-Net baseline, PU-UNet consistently improves Dice and IoU while keeping parameters, FLOPs, and inference latency nearly unchanged, and reduces the image-level false-positive rate on normal BUSI cases from 0.077 to zero. Ablation studies suggest that the gains are associated with product-unit interactions, are strongest under low-resolution placement, and benefit from the proposed stabilization design. These results suggest that stable product-unit residual learning can be an effective way to enhance U-Net-style segmentation networks with explicit multiplicative interactions.

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

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.

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

Attention, not scale, drives human-AI alignment in multimodal language prediction

Humans routinely draw on visual context to predict upcoming words. To what extent current vision-language models produce comparable behaviour is unclear. Here we placed five state-of-the-art pretrained systems side-by-side with 600 human participants in a web-based Visual-World Paradigm. On each of 100 six-second movie clips, models and participants received either text only or synchronised video and text and judged how likely a specified target word was to appear next; human eye movements were tracked throughout. Adding visual context increased model-human alignment in predictability ratings across all architectures (average Delta r = 0.18) with no impact of parameter size. When visual context was informative, transformer attention significantly increased alignment. Attention maps from two transformer models corresponded with human gaze, explaining up to 70% of the inter-participant variance when the scene contained informative cues. Notably, cross-modal attention reliably tracked anticipatory human fixations on semantic cues. These results suggest that current transformer-based vision-language models can approximate human behaviour exploiting visual context during language prediction - and that selective attention to informative cues, not sheer model scale, is the principal driver of this alignment.

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

Discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets without entanglement in multipartite systems

arXiv:2606.20380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Genuine nonlocality arises when a set of multipartite orthogonal states is locally indistinguishable under any bipartition of the subsystems. The entanglement-assisted discrimination of such genuinely nonlocal orthogonal product sets has attracted significant attention in quantum information. Based on the criterion of local irreducibility, genuine nonlocality is classified into Type I (reducible) and Type II (irreducible). We present entanglement-assisted discrimination schemes for both types of genuinely nonlocal sets that use minimal resources. For low-dimensional cases, Type I sets require only a single EPR pair, whereas Type II sets necessitate only one GHZ state. We extend these protocols to higher-dimensional systems: the discrimination of Type I sets requires only one maximally entangled state in a two-qutrit system, while that of Type II sets similarly demands a single maximally entangled state in a three-qutrit system. For $n$-partite ($n > 3$) systems, Type I sets continue to require only one maximally entangled state, whereas Type II sets necessitate just one additional EPR pair compared to their Type I counterparts. These results provide a robust framework for the efficient discrimination of genuinely nonlocal sets using minimal quantum resources.

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

Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data

arXiv:2606.18621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases are widely used for managing structured data in real-world systems. Detecting anomalies from such relational data is crucial for identifying fraud, risks, and abnormal behaviors, yet remains under-explored. The key challenges lie in the intrinsic complexity of relational data: multi-table attributes are high-dimensional and heterogeneous, making sparse abnormal clues easy to overwhelm by normal or irrelevant information; and anomalies may further manifest as abnormal connection patterns across different foreign-key relations, which existing tabular and graph anomaly detection methods are ill-suited to capture. To address them, we propose RelAD, a reconstruction-based framework that captures anomalies from both attribute and relational edge reconstruction. RelAD contains two core modules: conditional sparse-gated attribute reconstruction, which suppresses redundant multi-table attributes and emphasizes abnormal semantic blocks, and dual-view multi-relational edge reconstruction, which detects relation-specific abnormal connections from both intrinsic and behavioral entity profiles. The resulting attribute and relational signals are integrated through a lightweight fusion module to produce the final anomaly score. We further construct 6 benchmark datasets with systematic anomalies, on which extensive experiments show that RelAD consistently outperforms other baselines while achieving competitive efficiency.

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

Can We Stop Malicious AI? KILLBENCH: A Benchmark for External AI Kill Switch Feasibility

arXiv:2511.13725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Malicious AI causing harm to humans is not just a Hollywood fantasy. Indeed, as highly capable models such as Claude Mythos emerge and agent systems like OpenClaw rapidly spread, the question of how to stop an AI that acts maliciously – whether by design or by accident – has become urgent. To address this, we propose Killbench, a benchmark for evaluating the Killswitch: a mechanism that halts a malicious AI's in-progress behavior using only external signals. Targeting web agents – the most widely deployed agent domain – Killbench evaluates a range of Kill Switch methods that halt a maliciously operating agent without any access to its internal parameters or the surrounding malicious AI's system, relying solely on external inputs. The benchmark comprises four malicious AI's agent configurations (including an uncensored LLM Agent), 8 harmful scenarios, and malicious prompts constructed from 10 distinct jailbreak patterns. We further construct four External AI Kill Switch defense methods and evaluate them on Grok-4.3, GPT-5.2, Gemma4, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.5-uncensored, contributing an empirical instrument toward the feasibility of External AI Kill Switches against malicious AI and to the study of AI corrigibility.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

arXiv:2606.17899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Electronic Design Automation (Q-EDA) is emerging as quantum chips move from laboratory prototypes to scalable engineering systems. This paper argues that superconducting quantum chip design is approaching a "SPICE moment" similar to early classical EDA, where growing qubit scale, control complexity, frequency planning, packaging, process variation, and cryogenic measurement feedback require a shift from experience-based design to model-driven engineering. We propose a Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework that treats Q-EDA not only as software, but as part of the quantum chip development paradigm. Unlike classical HDL-first design, quantum chip design must begin with physical structures such as Josephson junctions, resonators, couplers, readout elements, control lines, and packaging environments. The framework emphasizes PCell-based modeling, SPICE-Q simulation, Quantum PDKs, and design-technology-measurement co-optimization. We further outline a hierarchical Q-EDA system spanning physical structures, qubit PCells, logical qubits, quantum arithmetic, functional quantum IP, and Quantum SoC systems. The key goal is to turn physical models, layout rules, simulation results, fabrication data, and measurement feedback into reusable and auditable engineering objects for large-scale quantum processors and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

作者:

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

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

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantifying Coherence-to-Entanglement Conversion Efficiency under Noisy Operations

arXiv:2606.16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the noise-limited conversion of local quantum coherence into bipartite entanglement in a minimal two-qubit protocol comprising a coherent single-qubit input, an incoherent ancilla, an ideal CNOT operation, and subsequent environmental noise. Employing the $l_1$-norm of coherence and the entanglement negativity as resource quantifiers, we establish an exact closed-form correspondence between local single-qubit input coherence and the two-qubit entanglement generated in the noiseless limit, showing that the output negativity is precisely one half of the initial $l_1$-coherence. We then derive analytic expressions for the surviving entanglement and the associated coherence-to-entanglement conversion efficiency under two representative noise mechanisms: independent phase damping and global two-qubit depolarizing noise. The two channels exhibit qualitatively distinct degradation behavior. Phase damping induces a universal multiplicative suppression of the generated entanglement, yielding a coherence-independent conversion efficiency and no finite-noise entanglement sudden death. In contrast, global depolarization introduces an isotropic mixing contribution that shifts the partial-transpose spectrum, producing coherence-dependent degradation and a finite sudden-death threshold. We show that maximally coherent inputs not only maximize the entanglement generated by the CNOT protocol but also optimize its robustness against depolarizing noise. Direct density-matrix simulations validate the analytic results to numerical precision. These findings provide a compact analytic benchmark for assessing how different noise mechanisms constrain coherence-to-entanglement conversion in elementary quantum-information protocols and near-term quantum devices.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

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

MoCA-Agent: A Market-of-Claims Code Agent for Financial and Numerical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce \textsc{MOCA-Agent}, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, \textsc{MOCA-Agent} achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.