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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Entangled states are typically incomparable

arXiv:2406.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider a bipartite quantum system, where Alice and Bob jointly possess a pure state $|\psi\rangle$. Using local quantum operations on their respective subsystems, and unlimited classical communication, Alice and Bob may be able to transform $|\psi\rangle$ into another state $|\phi\rangle$. Famously, Nielsen's theorem [Phys. Rev. Lett., 1999] provides a necessary and sufficient algebraic criterion for such a transformation to be possible (namely, the local spectrum of $|\phi\rangle$ should majorise the local spectrum of $|\psi\rangle$). In the paper where Nielsen proved this theorem, he conjectured that in the limit of large dimensionality, for almost all pairs of states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ (according to the natural unitary invariant measure) such a transformation is not possible. That is to say, typical pairs of quantum states $|\psi\rangle, |\phi\rangle$ are entangled in fundamentally different ways, that cannot be converted to each other via local operations and classical communication. Via Nielsen's theorem, this conjecture can be equivalently stated as a conjecture about majorisation of spectra of random matrices from the so-called trace-normalised complex Wishart-Laguerre ensemble. Concretely, let $X$ and $Y$ be independent $n \times m$ random matrices whose entries are i.i.d. standard complex Gaussians; then Nielsen's conjecture says that the probability that the spectrum of $X X^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(X X^\dagger)$ majorises the spectrum of $Y Y^\dagger / \operatorname{tr}(Y Y^\dagger)$ tends to zero as both $n$ and $m$ grow large. We prove this conjecture, and we also confirm some related predictions of Cunden, Facchi, Florio and Gramegna [J. Phys. A., 2020; Phys. Rev. A., 2021].

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

High-Fidelity 3D Geometric Reconstruction of Pelvic Organs from MRI: A Hybrid Deep Learning and Iterative Optimization Approach

Patient-specific 3D reconstruction of pelvic organ geometry from MRI is important for pelvic floor modeling and downstream patient-specific analysis. However, while previous studies have focused primarily on either image segmentation or downstream use of 3D models, the reconstruction of high-fidelity, high-quality geometries remains labor-intensive and poorly standardized. The study introduced a hybrid deformable shape modeling framework that integrates deep learning prediction with iterative optimization for the reconstruction of the bladder, uterus, and rectum. The framework consists of three core components: a geometry-aware multi-level deep learning architecture that preserves topological consistency of pelvic organs; a two-stage amortized optimization training strategy that balances global shape capture and local surface refinement; and a holistic synergy mechanism–where iterative optimization provides supervision for deep learning during the training phase, and during inference, deep learning rapidly predicts the global organ morphology, followed by iterative optimization to refine local surfaces and mesh quality. This framework demonstrated marked superiority in geometric fidelity than current mainstream deep learning-based organ reconstruction models. For individual anatomical structures, the reconstructed 3D geometries for the bladder, rectum, and uterus achieved significantly lower Chamfer Distance values and higher Dice Similarity Coefficient scores. In addition, while maintaining high computational efficiency, the proposed architecture yielded superior overall volumetric mesh quality. At the patient level, the framework achieved higher mean values for the 10 worst elements for both minSICN and minSIGE compared to traditional geometric post-processing algorithms.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Repurposing cardiovascular disease risk models to predict incident and co-occurring cardiovascular, cardiometabolic and neurocognitive outcomes.

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD), cardiometabolic and neurocognitive conditions share risk factors and frequently co-occur. We evaluated whether four established CVD risk prediction models (QRISK3, PCE, SCORE2, SCORE2-OP) can be repurposed to predict 10-year risk of these conditions and their co-occurrence with CVD. Methods: The models were recalibrated using 20% of the UK Biobank (UKB) and evaluated in the remaining 80%. We performed external validation using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum, assessing model discrimination (c-statistics) and calibration (intercept and slope). We used permuted feature importance to determine the influence of each individual predictor in the models. Results: Depending on the model, the c-statistics for incident CVD ranged from 0.71 to 0.74 in the UKB test set (16,137 events). Discrimination was equal to or higher than CVD when evaluated against non-traditional CVD outcomes: 0.74 to 0.77 for heart failure (3,471 events), 0.72 to 0.73 for atrial fibrillation (9,213 events), 0.73 to 0.75 for peripheral arterial disease (1,927 events) and 0.80 to 0.82 for abdominal aortic aneurysm (595 events). For the multimorbidity endpoints, model discrimination ranged from 0.74 for the composite of CVD and T2DM (SCORE2-OP) to 0.83 for the composite of CVD and dementia or Parkinson's disease (QRISK3). When considering the onset of any cardiovascular, cardiometabolic, or neurocognitive outcome discrimination ranged from 0.71 to 0.72. The repurposed models slightly underestimated the predicted risk in the CPRD compared to the UKB: average difference in calibration intercept was at most -0.64. After age and sex, smoking status and systolic blood pressure contributed most to model predictions. Conclusions: Repurposed CVD models can be used to identify 10-year risk of many CVD-related conditions and their multimorbidity. These may be used to support risk-based approaches to prevention and screening. The repurposed models have been made available at: https://repurposed-cvd-risk-models.shinyapps.io/cvd_cmd_dementia_app/ Keywords: Risk prediction; cardiovascular disease; cardiometabolic disease; dementia; disease prevention.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

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

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

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FreeBridge: Variational Schrödinger Bridges for Cellular Transition Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition. Perturbation modeling therefore reduces to inferring stochastic transport between control and treated populations observed only as separate marginals. While recent generative models achieve strong end-point alignment, boundary consistency does not determine intermediate evolution: multiple stochastic processes may connect identical marginals while traversing regions unsupported by observed single-cell morphologies. We introduce FreeBridge, a Schrödinger Bridge formulation for single-cell transition modeling under endpoint-only supervision. FreeBridge defines atomic states as instance-segmented single-cell representations, establishing a fixed cellular manifold, and learns stochastic transport constrained within this geometry via empirical latent support regularization. Across BBBC021, RxRx1, and JUMP, FreeBridge maintains competitive or improved endpoint fidelity and mechanism-of-action retention under a unified evaluation protocol; on BBBC021, it further reduces intermediate support violations. These findings highlight the importance of geometric grounding for biologically interpretable perturbation dynamics. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/FreeBridge/.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Algorithmic Prompt Generation for Diverse Human-like Teaming and Communication with Large Language Models

Understanding how humans collaborate and communicate in teams is essential for improving human-agent teaming and AI-assisted decision-making. However, relying solely on data from large-scale user studies is impractical due to logistical, ethical, and practical constraints, necessitating synthetic models of multiple diverse human behaviors. Recently, agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to emulate human-like behavior in social settings. But, obtaining a large set of diverse behaviors requires manual effort in the form of designing prompts. On the other hand, Quality Diversity (QD) optimization has been shown to be capable of generating diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent behavior. In this work, we combine QD optimization with LLM-powered agents to iteratively search for prompts that generate diverse team behavior in a long-horizon, multi-step collaborative environment. We first show, through a human-subjects experiment, that humans exhibit diverse coordination and communication behavior in this domain. We then present a series of experiments showing that our approach captures behaviors that are difficult to observe without large-scale data collection, and a follow-up user study to show that these generated behaviors are human-like. Our findings highlight the combination of QD and LLM-powered agents as an effective tool for studying teaming and communication strategies in multi-agent collaboration.

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

Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance in enhancing healthcare efficiency across a wide range of medical applications. Nevertheless, their limited ability to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world significantly constrains their effectiveness in real-world clinical workflows, where safety-critical decision-making and physical execution are tightly coupled. Recently, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising physical-interactive paradigm for intelligent healthcare, enabling agents to operate in complex medical environments. As research in this area rapidly expands, understanding how intelligent agents function as integrated, end-to-end systems in clinical environments becomes increasingly critical. However, existing surveys on medical embodied AI largely emphasize individual aspects or functional components, lacking a unified system-level organization of the field. To support and consolidate recent advances, we systematically survey the core components of medical embodied AI, with a particular emphasis on the coordinated integration of perception, decision-making, and action. We further review representative medical applications and relevant datasets, and we analyze the major challenges encountered in real-world clinical practice. Finally, we discuss key directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/VMVLab/Medical_Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation Results

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.

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

DIFF-ERO: A Conformance-Aware Loss for Deep Learning in Process Mining

arXiv:2606.14283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has driven many recent advances in process analytics, especially for predictive and prescriptive monitoring. However, standard objectives such as cross-entropy optimize local next-step likelihoods and only implicitly capture control-flow structure. As a result, models can achieve high token-level accuracy while permitting imprecise global behaviour. We introduce DIFF-ERO, a conformance-aware loss function for deep learning models on process data. DIFF-ERO is a differentiable formulation of entropy-based stochastic conformance that incorporates control-flow information during training. Our approach constructs batch-level stochastic transition matrices with soft edge memberships, allowing structural precision and recall signals to directly inform backpropagation. The loss is model-agnostic and can be applied whenever the final representation parametrizes stochastic transitions. We instantiate DIFF-ERO in transformer encoder-decoder pipelines for next-activity prediction and use it jointly with cross-entropy to analyse its theoretical components with respect to convergence. Across benchmarks comparing other loss functions and targets, DIFF-ERO shows improved predictive performance where structure matters most while maintaining parity elsewhere. At the same time, the learned stochastic automaton converges towards the structural ground truth, indicating that the network internalizes process model structure.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

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

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

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

A Mathematical Forum Platform for Collaborative Problem Solving and Dataset Generation for AI Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharing mathematical content in online forums remains a significant friction point for students and educators: writing raw LATEX is error-prone, standalone optical character recognition tools require platform switching, and current forum software offers no integrated path from a photograph of a formula to a rendered post. We present a unified system that eliminates this friction by embedding an image to LATEX conversion pipeline directly inside a forum posting interface. A user uploads or captures an image of a mathematical expression; the system routes it through the Mathpix OCR API, detects whether the returned output is LATEX or plain text containing inline math, applies the appropriate delimiter normalisation, and renders a live preview in either LATEX or Markdown mode before the post is committed to the database. The architecture is organized in three loosely coupled layers: image processing, rendering, and storage, and supports both desktop and mobile clients. A provisional US patent application has been filed covering the core methods. We describe the full system design, each component in detail, the data schema, and the key technical innovations, and we position the work against existing standalone tools and forum platforms to demonstrate the practical gap it closes. Beyond immediate usability, we argue that a deployed platform of this kind constitutes a continuously growing, community-validated dataset of mathematical problems and step-by-step solutions, a resource that can be used to train and benchmark AI systems for accurate mathematical reasoning

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

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

Boundary Embedding Shaping with Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Graph Structural Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.20283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near class boundaries in the embedding space, where amplified structural noise blurs decision boundaries and destabilizes predictions. Existing robust GNN methods largely treat all nodes uniformly, ignoring boundary vulnerabilities. In this paper, to improve classification performance, we tackle graph structural disentanglement by identifying boundary-region entanglement as the primary bottleneck and propose Boundary Embedding Shaping (BES), an adaptive contrastive learning GNN plug-in module that selectively suppresses spurious structural noise at decision boundaries with minimal model parameter perturbation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BES consistently improves boundary discrimination and outperforms existing leading methods. Notably, BES boosts GCN performance by an average of 3.3% in node classification (up to 5.0% on WikiCS) and achieves superior accuracy in link prediction.

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

Mojo: A Promising Tool for Scalable Financial AI Efficiency

作者:

arXiv:2606.16059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For thirty years, quantitative finance has paid a costly two-language tax: models researched in Python are rewritten in C++ for production, often introducing numerical discrepancies. GPU-accelerated deep learning exacerbates this problem, as nondeterministic floating-point reductions can produce drift in long backtests, challenging regulatory reproducibility and auditability expectations. This article surveys Mojo, Modular's 2026 Python-like systems language, as a structural response for capital markets engineering. While closing the Python-to-C++ performance gap, Mojo uniquely combines native interoperability with the low-level systems control required to construct bit-exact deterministic kernels. Its MLIR compilation infrastructure further allows a single codebase to target scalar, SIMD, multicore, and GPU execution, reducing the translation bottleneck between research and production. We benchmark four core financial AI workloads: Monte Carlo option pricing, LLM sentiment inference, multi-asset backtesting, and portfolio Value at Risk. On Apple Silicon, Mojo demonstrates 20x to 180x speedups over pure Python on directly measured kernels; larger-scale GPU workload results are projections calibrated from published benchmarks. Alongside transparent performance data, we introduce mojo-deterministic, an open-source library of reproducible reduction kernels, and provide a candid assessment of the problems Mojo does and does not yet solve.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

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

PhysGuard: Fisher-Guided Gradient Projection for Sim-to-Real Neural PDE Surrogates

arXiv:2606.16602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operator models trained on simulation data often lose accuracy when applied to experimental measurements due to the sim-to-real gap. Standard fine-tuning with limited real data can reduce this gap, but it may also damage the core physics-relevant representations learned during pretraining. Although knowledge-preserving adaptation has been widely investigated in vision or language tasks, it remains unclear whether these methods are suitable for neural operators whose architectures and protected knowledge are fundamentally different. Neural operators need to preserve core-scale physical structures rather than semantic or visual features. We propose PhysGuard, a physics-preserving framework for accurate sim-to-real adaptation of neural operators. Specifically, PhysGuard uses the empirical Fisher Information Matrix computed on simulation data to identify physics-critical parameter directions, then restricts fine-tuning updates to directions that do not interfere with them. A layer-wise Gram-matrix formulation makes this efficient for models with millions of parameters, while an adaptive threshold automatically determines the protected subspace size. A spectral probe experiment shows that the dominant Fisher directions are strongly associated with low-frequency output structures. Experiments on benchmark across four neural operator architectures and different physical systems show that PhysGuard performs strongly on most evaluation metrics compared to baselines. The benefits are most evident under severe domain shift, where it reduces low-frequency error by up to 32\% compared to standard fine-tuning while maintaining adaptability. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouChaunge/PhysGuard.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Kairos: A Native World Model Stack for Physical AI

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Experimental Characterization and Modeling of Measurement-Induced State-Transitions in a Fluxonium Superconducting Qubit

arXiv:2606.17866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting qubits are most often measured using dispersive readout, which, ideally, implements a projective quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement. While a larger readout drive can increase the signal and, thus, reduce discrimination errors in the readout, strong microwave drives may also cause non-QND errors by driving the qubit to a state outside the computational subspace. In this work, we experimentally characterize measurement-induced state transitions (MIST) in a fluxonium qubit over its full external flux range. We further numerically calculate the MIST errors, and find that the theory accurately predicts eleven experimentally identified regions with increased MIST. In addition to transitions to higher fluxonium levels, we also find that, at certain flux points, MIST errors are dominated by transitions that include the transmission-line-like array modes of the fluxonium's superinductor. The excellent match between theory and experiment validates that the models accurately predict the occurrence of MIST in these systems, and further highlights the influence of array modes in fluxonium readout.