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

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606.17006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

An alternative approach to well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov equations arising in Consensus-Based Optimization

arXiv:2512.19446v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work we study the mean-field description of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a derivative-free particle optimization method. Such a description is provided by a non-local SDE of McKean-Vlasov type, whose fields lack of global Lipschitz continuity. We propose a novel approach to prove the well-posedness of the mean-field CBO equation based on a truncation argument. The latter is performed through the introduction of a cut-off function, defined on the space of probability measures, acting on the fields. This procedure allows us to study the well-posedness problem in the classical framework of Sznitman. Through this argument, we recover the established result on the existence of strong solutions, and we extend the class of solutions for which pathwise uniqueness holds.

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

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

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

Does AI Reviewer See the Full Picture? Attacking and Defending Multimodal Peer Review

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) into scientific peer-review workflows introduces novel and significant risks for adversarial manipulation, especially given the multimodal nature of scientific papers where figures, not just text, convey core evidence. This creates a significant gap: current robustness studies on AI peer-review are overwhelmingly text-only. Moreover, the problem is distinct from standard jailbreaking, as a peer-review attack seeks to induce a domain-specific, targeted failure (e.g., "inflate this score") rather than a general safety policy violation, for which no practical defenses exist. To address this, we introduce PaperGuard, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and defend AI-generated peer-review against these domain-specific, cross-modal attacks. Our framework is built on three pillars: (1) a new multimodal peer-review dataset spanning multiple scientific domains; (2) a unified suite of attacks, including black-box prompt injections and white-box perturbations, specifically designed to target both text (GCG) and figures (PGD); and (3) a practical defense, motivated by the long-context challenge of academic papers, that uses chunk-based embedding search to efficiently localize and mitigate harmful instructions. Our extensive experiments, conducted across state-of-the-art models, confirm that AI reviewers are pervasively vulnerable. PaperGuard establishes the foundational benchmark, protocols, and actionable defense necessary to pioneer trustworthy, attack-resilient AI-assisted scholarly reviewing.

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

EHRNote-ChatQA: A Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multi-Turn Clinical Question Answering over Longitudinal Discharge Summaries

Discharge summaries are crucial clinical documents containing the context of a patient's overall hospital stay, and are routinely reviewed by medical experts for patient readmission, ongoing care, and diagnostic decision-making. When reviewing them, medical experts often must iteratively synthesize information across multiple summaries while verifying the evidence supporting each answer. Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for clinical question answering, existing benchmarks do not sufficiently reflect this setting: they often evaluate exam-style medical knowledge or focus on single-turn question answering with limited evidence-grounding evaluation. We introduce EHRNote-ChatQA, the first benchmark for evidence-grounded multi-turn clinical question answering over patients' multiple discharge summaries. Built from de-identified MIMIC-IV discharge summaries, EHRNote-ChatQA contains 967 patient-level multi-turn samples spanning one to five notes and 16,072 medical-expert-verified QA pairs (8,036 content questions, each paired with an evidence-grounding question) across eight clinical categories. The benchmark is constructed through an expert-informed pipeline combining discharge-summary structuring schema, expert-curated multi-turn QA templates, and LLM-based generation, followed by review and revision of every single QA sample by 11 medical experts. Benchmarking 22 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals several challenges, including that LLMs struggle more with evidence grounding than content answering, multi-turn errors compound across turns, and single-turn clinical QA performance does not reliably transfer to this setting. These findings establish EHRNote-ChatQA as a rigorous and practical benchmark for evaluating clinical QA systems. The dataset will be made publicly available through PhysioNet credentialed access.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Spatial And Frequency Views For Disaster Assessment: Benefits And Limitations

Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery. While most deep learning methods rely on spatial-domain features, frequency-domain representations can capture complementary structural cues such as debris patterns and collapse-induced textures. This study presents a controlled comparison of spatial-domain, frequency-domain, and dual-domain deep learning approaches for multi-class building damage classification using post-disaster imagery from the xView2 (xBD) dataset. To ensure fairness, all models are built on an EfficientNet-B0 backbone and trained under identical settings, differing only in their input representations and fusion strategies. Performance is evaluated using accuracy, macro F1-score, per-class metrics, and confusion matrices. Results show that dual-domain models provide measurable improvements over single-domain approaches. The dual spatial configuration achieves the highest test accuracy (0.4688) and lowest loss, while the spatial-only model attains the best macro F1-score (0.4254), indicating more balanced class performance. In contrast, frequency-only models perform worst and exhibit overfitting, suggesting limited generalization. Despite these gains, all models struggle to detect subtle damage levels, particularly the Minor class, due to class imbalance and fine-grained visual ambiguity. While dual-domain approaches improve detection of severe damage, challenges remain. These findings highlight the benefits and limitations of hybrid representations and motivate future work on data balancing, advanced fusion, and regularization.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

arXiv:2606.19482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Robust and Interpretable Adaptation of Equivariant Materials Foundation Models via Sparsity-promoting Fine-tuning

arXiv:2606.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained materials foundation models, or machine learning interatomic potentials, leverage general physicochemical knowledge to effectively approximate potential energy surfaces. However, they often require domain-specific calibration due to physicochemical diversity as well as mismatches between practical computational settings and those used in constructing the pre-training data. To address this, we propose a sparsity-promoting fine-tuning method that selectively updates model parameters by exploiting the structural properties of E(3)-equivariant materials foundation models. On energy and force prediction tasks across molecular and crystalline benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses full fine-tuning and equivariant low-rank adaptation while updating only $\sim$3~\% of parameters, and in some cases as little as $\sim$0.5~\%. Beyond energy and force calibration, we further demonstrate task generalizability by applying our method to magnetic moment prediction and magnetism-aware total energy modeling. Finally, analysis of sparsity patterns reveals physically interpretable signatures, such as enhanced $d$-orbital contributions in transition metal systems. Overall, our results establish sparsity-promoting fine-tuning as a flexible and interpretable method for domain specialization of equivariant materials foundation models.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

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

Towards Effective Waste Segmentation for Automated Waste Recycling in Cluttered Background

Rapid expansion of urban areas and population growth is causing an immense increase in waste production, which demands the need for efficient and automated waste management. In this scenario, automated waste recycling (AWR) using deep learning methods can assist humans in optimal waste management. Recent deep learning approaches for AWR provide promising waste segmentation performance, however, these methods rely on large backbone networks that are inefficient for AWR systems and suffer from performance deterioration in cluttered scenes. To this end, an optimal waste segmentation network is introduced which effectively utilizes the spatial domain to capture localized structural dependencies and the spectral domain to efficiently extract global contextual relationships. This cascaded design allows the network to progressively leverage both local and global representations across complementary domains to highlight the semantic information necessary for effective segmentation of various waste objects. Furthermore, auxiliary feature enhancement module (AFEM) is introduced to enhance the target objects' boundaries and blob amplification for better segmentation in cluttered scenarios. Extensive experimentation on ZeroWaste-aug, ZeroWaste-f and SpectralWaste datasets reveals the merits of the proposed method.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

arXiv:2602.03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Ensuring Trustworthy Online A/B Testing: Addressing Five Key Questions on CUPED

arXiv:2606.18750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A/B testing has become the gold standard for data-driven decision-making in large-scale online experimentation, providing critical guidance for feature launch, pricing optimization, and user experience enhancement. To maximize statistical sensitivity, many technology companies routinely employ Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data (CUPED), a technique that achieves substantial variance reduction while preserving the unbiasedness of estimating the average treatment effect. Despite its widespread adoption, several critical methodological and practical nuances of CUPED remain underexplored. This paper systematically addresses five frequently encountered yet overlooked questions regarding the application of CUPED. First, we provide a comparative analysis of various post-CUPED estimators to identify the optimal adjustment specification. Second, we evaluate the validity of regression-based adjustments and delineate robust variance estimation methods tailored for such frameworks. Finally, we extend our investigation to complex but common scenarios, including multi-arm experiments and two-stage sampling designs. Our findings reveal that in these settings, naive reliance on standard variance estimators can lead to severely misleading inferences. By offering rigorous theoretical insights and extensive experimental validation, this work deepens the conceptual understanding of CUPED. Notably, the recommended methodologies have been successfully deployed and integrated into ByteDance's experimentation platform.

14.
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.

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

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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

LUCID: Learned Undersampling-Adaptive Consistency-Guided Inference with Deterministic Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view CT reduces radiation dose and scanning time by acquiring fewer projection views, but angular undersampling makes reconstruction severely ill-posed, causing streak artifacts, structural blurring, and loss of fine details. Existing supervised methods are often tied to specific sampling settings, whereas generative methods may introduce anatomically inconsistent hallucination-like structures under severe undersampling. We propose Lucid, a sparsity-adaptive, consistency-guided reconstruction framework based on a Flow Matching generative prior for sparse-view CT. Lucid is trained only on high-quality CT images to learn a continuous transport between a Gaussian distribution and the high-quality CT image distribution, independent of view sampling. During inference, the sampling sparsity level is explicitly incorporated to adapt the generative trajectory of a single pretrained model. Specifically, Lucid constructs a degradation-matched initial state by sparsity-weighted fusion of the sparse-view FBP image and Gaussian noise, performs sparsity-modulated Flow Matching updates, and applies projection-domain data-consistency correction after each prior update. Experiments under multiple sparse-view settings show that Lucid achieves stable reconstruction performance across different sampling densities, improves image quality and structural fidelity, and reduces the risk of hallucination-like structures in generative sparse-view CT reconstruction.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

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

Internet of Everything in the 6G Era: Paradigms, Enablers, Potentials and Future Directions

arXiv:2604.25018v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Internet of Everything (IoE) represents an evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) by integrating people, data, processes, and things into a unified intelligent ecosystem. IoE aims to enhance automation, decision-making, and service efficiency across multiple application domains such as smart cities, healthcare, industry, and next-generation wireless networks. This paper provides a structured overview of the IoE concept, its core components, architectural foundations, enabling technologies, and major research challenges. Finally, open research directions toward 6G-enabled intelligent IoE systems are discussed, with emphasis on scalability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency.

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

APT: Atomic Physical Transitions for Causal Video-Language Understanding

Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them. A clip-level label such as "bounce" can be correct while hiding the process that makes the event physically valid, from support loss and contact onset to rebound and settling. To make this hidden process explicit, we introduce Atomic Physical Transitions (APTs): minimal, temporally localized state changes that bind a visible cue to an active physical mechanism and before/after dynamical regimes. An APT chain represents a video as an ordered causal transition sequence rather than a single aggregate event label: event labels tell what happened; APT chains explain why it happened. To make APTs learnable by VLMs, we construct mixed-source APT data from human annotations and simulator ground truth, covering 14 transition types across contact, gravity, friction, and rotation/stability, with 27,303 timed instances over 1,246 trials. Using this data, we find that current VLMs miss transition-level physics, with zero-shot recall at most 14% and errors dominated by missed transitions. Direct fine-tuning on APT chains improves transition detection but causes event-level forgetting, indicating that the model learns a specialized answer format rather than a reusable physical representation. We therefore propose APT-Tune, a parameter-efficient recipe that teaches VLMs to use causal transitions without forgetting how to answer video questions. It combines image-pad-aware supervision, format-conditional co-training, and mechanism-conditioned domain-to-type decoding to make APT learning format-robust and physically grounded. With only 11 M LoRA parameters on Qwen3-VL-2B, APT-Tune substantially improves APT recall while also improving event-level video transfer. These results show that APTs are not a new answer format, but a human-aligned causal supervision signal for physical video understanding.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Calibrated Helstrom geometry on the Bloch ball via Connes spectral distance

arXiv:2606.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the equal-prior Helstrom trace-distance geometry of qubit states is recovered from Connes spectral distance in a finite scalar-qubit-scalar model. The two scalar reference sectors couple isotropically to the qubit block through identity Dirac links, so that the full Bloch ball, including mixed states, inherits its standard chordal trace-distance geometry from the finite spectral metric. The scalar-sector distances serve a distinct calibration role: they determine the individual link lengths, satisfy a Pythagorean consistency relation, and reconstruct the middle-sector scale.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Implementing Hamiltonian Renormalization Group Flow on Quantum Computers with VAPOR

arXiv:2606.11306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Hamiltonian Lattice Gauge Theory is gaining traction, today's limited numerical capacity leaves simulations affected by discretization errors. This motivates the implementation of renormalization group (RG) techniques to find discretization-error-free operators. To this end, we introduce VAPOR, a variational quantum algorithm that decomposes operators into Pauli strings, identifies RG flow orbits, and determines fixed points of a naively discretized operator. We illustrate this using a toy model of a kinematic operator in a symmetry-restricted SU(2) Yang-Mills theory.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

ReNikud: Audio-Supervised Hebrew Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Modern Hebrew is needed for applications like text-to-speech (TTS), but is challenging due to the language's abjad writing system, which leaves vowels largely unwritten, creating substantial ambiguity. Standard approaches first predict vowel diacritics (nikud) to produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, but this is limited: vocalization data is scarce and laborious to produce, it does not specify features such as lexical stress, and it reflects formal grammatical rules rather than everyday spoken pronunciation. Direct sequence-to-sequence IPA prediction, meanwhile, struggles on limited data and fails to exploit the character-level alignment characteristic of abjads. Our method, ReNikud, overcomes these limitations with two key insights: (1) Weak audio supervision via a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labeling pipeline on thousands of hours of unlabeled Hebrew audio, yielding phonemic transcriptions that reflect natural spoken norms without manual annotation. (2) A pseudo-vocalization architecture that predicts IPA phonemes at each character position, enforcing character-level alignment as an inductive bias. Results on existing Hebrew G2P benchmarks and the new targeted MILIM benchmark for spoken Hebrew show that ReNikud surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and trained models to support further work on Hebrew TTS and speech technologies.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.