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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Speech-Driven End-to-End Language Discrimination towards Chinese Dialects

Authors:
Fan Xu↗Jian Luo↗MingWen Wang↗GuoDong Zhou↗

Language discrimination among similar languages, varieties, and dialects is a challenging natural language processing task. The traditional text-driven focus leads to poor results. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of speech-driven features towards language discrimination among Chinese dialects. First, we systematically explore the appropriateness of speech-driven MFCC features towards CNN-based language discrimination. Then, we design an end-to-end speech recognition model based on HMM-DNN to predict Chinese dialect words. We adopt attention to extract the discriminative words related to different Chinese dialects. Finally, through a CNN, we combine the word-level embedding and the MFCC-based features. Evaluation of two benchmark Chinese dialect corpora shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of the proposed speech-driven approach to fine-grained Chinese dialect discrimination compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

Authors:
Yicheng Feng↗Xin Tan↗Yangtao Deng↗Yimin Jiang↗Yibo Zhu↗Hong Xu↗

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

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03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

Authors:
Gokul Parameswaran↗

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

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

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

Authors:
Marcos Abel Zuzu\'arregui↗Stefano Carpin↗

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

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

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Authors:
Kushal Raj Bhandari↗Ling Yue↗Ching-Yun Ko↗Dhaval Patel↗Shaowu Pan↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Jianxi Gao↗

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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

RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

Authors:
Deborah Dore↗Elena Cabrio↗Serena Villata↗

The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens. However, the specificity of the political language and the argumentative form of these debates (employing hidden communication strategies and leveraging implicit arguments) make this task very challenging, even for current general-purpose pre-trained Language Models (LMs). To address this, we introduce a novel pre-trained LM for political discourse language called RooseBERT. Pre-training a LM on a specialised domain presents different technical and linguistic challenges, requiring extensive computational resources and large-scale data. RooseBERT has been trained on large political debate and speech corpora (11GB) in English. To evaluate its performances, we fine-tuned it on multiple downstream tasks related to political debate analysis, i.e., stance detection, sentiment analysis, argument component detection and classification, argument relation prediction and classification, policy classification, named entity recognition (NER). Our results show improvements over general-purpose LMs on the majority of these tasks, highlighting how domain-specific pre-training enhances performance in political debate analysis. We release RooseBERT for the research community.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ZeSTA: Zero-Shot TTS Augmentation with Domain-Conditioned Training for Data-Efficient Personalized Speech Synthesis

Authors:
Youngwon Choi↗Jinwoo Oh↗Hwayeon Kim↗Hyeonyu Kim↗

arXiv:2603.04219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.

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

WallZero: Mastering the Game of WallGo with Strategic Analysis

Authors:
Hsing-Yu Chen↗J\'er\^ome Arjonilla↗I-Chen Wu↗Ti-Rong Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WallGo is a recently introduced strategic board game popularized by the 2025 Netflix series The Devil's Plan. Although played on a small 7 x 7 board, its combination of stone movement and wall placement yields high game-tree complexity and intricate strategic interactions. Despite its growing popularity, WallGo remains underexplored. This paper presents WallZero, an AlphaZero-based agent for the two-player WallGo setting. We introduce tailored action and feature designs to improve playing performance significantly. In the evaluation, WallZero defeats two professional Go players who participated in this study, securing on average 1.98x more territory per game. Beyond its strength, we use WallZero to assess game fairness and identify key strategies for mastering WallGo. Interestingly, our results show that the opening used in the Netflix series yields a more balanced game. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/wallzero.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Guhong Chen↗Yingcheng Shi↗Yongbin Li↗Binhua Li↗Xander Xu↗Hu Wei↗Shiwen Ni↗Min Yang↗Jieping Ye↗

arXiv:2606.03108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous LLM training is often framed as recipe search, which leaves the training harness largely static. This limitation sharpens in agentic RL, where shifting bottlenecks and scalar rewards mask diverse failure modes. We introduce EvoTrainer, an autonomous training framework that co-evolves LLM policies and training-side harnesses through empirical feedback: it diagnoses rollout-level evidence, revises diagnostics, backtests interventions, and accumulates reusable skills. Evaluated on mathematical reasoning, competitive-programming code generation, and repository-level software engineering, EvoTrainer matches or exceeds the human-engineered RL references under the same data, codebase, and evaluation protocol, with the largest gain on long-horizon agentic SWE. Trajectory analyses show that retained strategies diverge across domains, evolving diagnostics prevent invalid high-scoring branches from being promoted, and reusable skills shape later search. Autonomous LLM RL should move beyond recipe search toward joint evolution of policies and the training harnesses that interpret them.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Optimal classical shadow estimation of unitary channels at Heisenberg limit

Authors:
Entong He↗Zihao Li↗Noam Scully↗Sisi Zhou↗Yuxiang Yang↗

arXiv:2606.13638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full tomography of an unknown quantum evolution is resource-intensive and often unnecessary when the goal is only to predict selected properties. This motivates the study of classical shadow estimation of unitary channels (CSEU), a task in which one queries an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$ and stores classical data that can later be used to predict expectation values $\mathrm{tr}[O \cdot U\rho U^\dagger]$ up to additive error $\varepsilon$ for arbitrary input states $\rho$ and observables $O$. We propose a parallel, non-adaptive CSEU protocol using $\mathcal{O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ queries when the input states or observables have constant rank. This achieves Heisenberg scaling with respect to $\varepsilon$ and is query-optimal, as we prove a matching $\Omega(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ lower bound that remains valid even with stronger access to the unknown unitary. Our query-optimal CSEU protocol provides a versatile and powerful tool for quantum learning theory, pushing the performance limits of several fundamental learning tasks, including unitary channel tomography, Hamiltonian learning, boundary-regime quantum channel tomography, Pauli transfer matrix learning, inverse-free amplitude estimation, pure-state property estimation, and shallow-circuit learning. Remarkably, we show that optimal unitary channel tomography can be achieved using only parallel queries, closing the gap between the best achievable efficiency of parallel and sequential tomography protocols. Together, these applications establish our framework as a fundamental tool for learning properties of quantum processes, particularly for certain key tasks that require high precision.

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

Brep2Shape: Boundary and Shape Representation Alignment via Self-Supervised Transformers

Authors:
Yuanxu Sun↗Yuezhou Ma↗Haixu Wu↗Guanyang Zeng↗Muye Chen↗Jianmin Wang↗Mingsheng Long↗

arXiv:2602.07429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Boundary representation (B-rep) is the industry standard for computer-aided design (CAD). While deep learning shows promise in processing B-rep models, existing methods suffer from a representation gap: continuous approaches offer analytical precision but are visually abstract, whereas discrete methods provide intuitive clarity at the expense of geometric precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce Brep2Shape, a novel self-supervised pre-training method designed to align abstract boundary representations with intuitive shape representations. Our method employs a geometry-aware task where the model learns to predict dense spatial points from parametric Bézier control points, enabling the network to better understand physical manifolds derived from abstract coefficients. To enhance this alignment, we propose a Dual Transformer backbone with parallel streams that independently encode surface and curve tokens to capture their distinct geometric properties. Moreover, the topology attention is integrated to model the interdependencies between surfaces and curves, thereby maintaining topological consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Brep2Shape offers significant scalability, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and faster convergence across various downstream tasks.Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/thuml/Brep2Shape.

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

The Token Is a Group Element: On Lie-Algebra Attention over Matrix Lie Groups

Authors:
Przemyslaw Musialski↗

arXiv:2606.20547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We place the attention token on the group: a token is an element $g_i$ of a matrix Lie group $G$ – a bare transformation, with no feature payload and no external action $\rho(g)$ carrying it. To our knowledge this is the first attention construction whose tokens are bare matrix Lie group elements: their score is the closed-form algebra norm of the relative pose rather than a learned kernel, and it reaches the affine full-frame groups that every irrep- or surjective-exp-based method must exclude. We call it Lie-Algebra Attention. Once tokens are group elements, the rest follows with none of the usual representation-theoretic machinery. The relative geometry of a pair is canonical, $g_i^{-1} g_j$, so the pairwise invariant $w_{ij} = \log(g_i^{-1} g_j)$ is intrinsic rather than designed; equivariance under the diagonal $G$-action is tautological, and the cocycle condition holds automatically. The attention score is the negative squared algebra norm, $s_{ij} = -\|\log(g_i^{-1} g_j)\|_\lambda^2/\tau$: the canonical proximity kernel under a block-weighted Frobenius inner product, with no irreducible representations, spherical harmonics, Clebsch-Gordan products, or learned kernel. The construction applies to any matrix Lie group on a chosen logarithm chart containing the relative poses, including the non-compact non-abelian affine groups with scale and shear that no vector-token attention method reaches: neither the irrep tradition nor surjective-exp methods. Three sequence-completion experiments, on SE(2), SO(3), and Aff(2), bear this out: the closed-form score matches a learned MLP kernel on the same invariant and outperforms it on SE(2), using 50 to 80x fewer score parameters, while a vector-token baseline breaks invariance by five to twelve orders of magnitude.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

Authors:
Baishali Chaudhury↗Mengdie Flora Wang↗Hyunji Hayley Park↗Rahul Ghosh↗Sungmin Hong↗Jae Oh Woo↗

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Metabolic quantum limit to the information capacity of magnetoencephalography

Authors:
E. Gkoudinakis↗S. Li↗I. K. Kominis↗

arXiv:2511.06401v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Magnetoencephalography measures the magnetic fields generated by neural currents using quantum sensors such as superconducting quantum interference devices and atomic magnetometers. Here we combine the energy resolution limit of magnetic sensing with the metabolic power available to neural currents to derive a technology-independent bound on the information capacity of MEG. The bound factorizes into geometry, metabolism, and Planck's constant, and gives an estimated maximum information rate of 2.2~Mbit/s for representative human-brain parameters. Further, we show that the externally measurable magnetic field has a finite angular bandwidth, with high multipole components being geometrically attenuated and falling below the quantum-limited noise floor. This yields an information-limited spatial scale of order $1~cm$ and renders the accessible measurement space effectively finite-dimensional. The energy resolution limit therefore defines an information-theoretic Nyquist scale for magnetoencephalography, beyond which denser spatial sampling provides redundant measurements rather than additional recoverable information. Since the energy resolution limit also makes the noise variance grow linearly with measurement bandwidth, temporal and spatial bandwidths compete, producing a fundamental spatio-temporal trade-off. These results show how quantum-limited measurements constrain the observable complexity and information content of noninvasive brain imaging, providing a quantitative link between fundamental physics and neuroscience.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Authors:
Artyom Mazur↗Nina Konovalova↗Aibek Alanov↗

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

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

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

Authors:
Biswadeep Sen↗Yi-Chieh Lee↗

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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

Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Authors:
He-Bi Yang↗Jing-Zhong Chen↗Yen-Kuan Ho↗Sang NguyenQuang↗Fan-Yi Hsu↗Yun-Yu Lee↗Jui-Chiu Chiang↗Wen-Hsiao Peng↗

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive real-time rendering, it frequently struggles to synthesize high-frequency textures, a limitation heavily exacerbated in memory-constrained and rate-distortion-optimized (RDO) pipelines. To address this, we propose a versatile 2D perceptual wrapper that enhances the rendered outputs of existing 3DGS representations in a content- and view-dependent manner. Our method leverages a lightweight synthesis network conditioned on pseudo-random Gaussian noise to synthesize perceptually plausible textures. Supervised by Wasserstein Distortion, the network learns to match local feature statistics rather than strictly enforcing pixel-wise reconstruction fidelity, effectively mitigating the blurriness inherent in standard frameworks. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our plug-and-play approach across vanilla, memory-constrained, and RDO 3DGS methods. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments confirm that our method significantly improves over existing baselines, yielding superior perceptual quality at sharply reduced file or model sizes.

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

Comparing Human Gaze and Vision-Language Model Attention in Safety-Relevant Environments

Authors:
Marta Vallejo↗Siwen Wang↗

Human visual attention plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to environments containing potential risks. This study investigates whether large vision-language models can identify the same regions of a scene that attract human attention in safety-relevant environments. Eye-tracking data were collected from ten participants viewing 33 scene images representing environments with varying levels of potential risk using Pupil Invisible wearable glasses. Gaze coordinates were mapped onto stimulus images to generate population-averaged human gaze heatmaps. In parallel, GPT-4o was prompted through the OpenAI Vision Application Programming Interface (API) to generate spatial predictions of visual attention, which were converted into saliency maps for comparison with human gaze patterns. Spatial alignment between human gaze heatmaps and model-generated saliency maps was evaluated using four complementary metrics: Pearson correlation (r = 0.515 +- 0.117), Normalised Scanpath Saliency (NSS = 0.988 +- 0.323), Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL = 1.766 +- 0.844), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve using the Judd formulation (AUC-Judd = 0.806 +- 0.076). A cross-model comparison with Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Claude showed that all models exceeded the AUC-Judd chance baseline of 0.5 and achieved positive NSS scores. Gemini Pro demonstrated the strongest spatial localisation according to three of the four metrics, whereas GPT-4o produced the closest distributional match to human attention as measured by KL divergence. These findings suggest that large vision-language models can identify regions that broadly correspond to where humans direct visual attention in safety-relevant scenes without requiring eye-tracking training data. The results highlight the potential of vision-language models as a scalable tool for approximating human attentional patterns.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A quantum implementation of high-order power method for estimating geometric entanglement of pure states

Authors:
Andrii Semenov↗Niall Murphy↗Simone Patscheider↗Alessandra Bernardi↗Elena Blokhina↗

arXiv:2405.19134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement is one of the fundamental properties of a quantum state and is a crucial differentiator between classical and quantum computation. There are many ways to define entanglement and its measure, depending on the problem or application under consideration. Each of these measures may be computed or approximated by multiple methods. However, hardly any of these methods can be run on near-term quantum hardware. This work presents a quantum adaptation of the iterative high-order power method for estimating the geometric measure of entanglement of multi-qubit pure states using rank-1 tensor approximation. This method is executable on early fault-tolerant (hybrid) quantum hardware and does not depend on quantum memory. We simulate this algorithm and mitigate the effects of noise on the results of the computation using a theoretical model based on a known mitigation approach, which assumes a global depolarising noise channel.

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

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

Authors:
Jingyuan Huang↗Zuming Huang↗Yucheng Shi↗Tianze Yang↗Xiaoming Zhai↗Wei Chu↗Ninghao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.

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

Quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression of Kasevich-Chu atom interferometer with motional squeezing states

Authors:
Dongyang Yu↗Yubin Wang↗Fong En Oon↗Qiang Lin↗

arXiv:2606.16632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybridization of internal and external atomic degrees of freedom in a Kasevich-Chu interferometer enables the possibility to enhance the sensitivity significantly even under quantum-standard limit. By introducing motional squeezing state as an input, we systematically derive the computational framework of quantum and classical Fisher information of two measurement protocols for arbitrary strength of Doppler effects. Through maximizing the corresponding classical Fisher information, we obtain the optimal control parameters and the corresponding quantum Fisher information. For population measurement, the largest sensitivity can be as large as four times than the semi-classical limit through enlarging the atom coherence length. For joint measurement of population and position, the competition between quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression induces two three behaviors, in one regime, the quantum enhancement dominates even in presence of strong Doppler broadening effects where the sensitivity is significantly enhanced; while in another regime, an optimal squeezing parameter is observed where the classical Fisher information reaches the maximum. Our results clearly demonstrate the robustness of external quantum enhancement against Doppler suppression. Our proposal can be readily applied to gravimeter of mobile platform where decoherence from noise will damage the many-body entanglement of internal spin squeezing.

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

When Do LLMs Reason? A Dynamical Systems View via Entropy Phase Transitions

Authors:
Wei Xia↗Haoqing Wang↗Zhi-Hong Deng↗Yehui Tang↗

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking paradox: CoT often provides marginal or even negative gains on factual and open-ended tasks while multiplying token consumption. In this work, we show that LLM reasoning is not a static property of tasks or models, but a dynamic decoding state that emerges during generation. Through systematic analysis, we find early-stage entropy dynamics provide a reliable signal of this state: tasks benefiting from CoT exhibit consistent entropy reduction, while others display unstable or increasing patterns. This behavior can be interpreted as a phase-transition-like shift from a high-entropy exploratory regime to a low-entropy structured reasoning regime. Based on these insights, we propose EDRM (Entropy Dynamics-based Reasoning Manifold), a lightweight and training-free routing framework that leverages early decoding entropy to adaptively select inference strategies. EDRM embeds entropy trajectories into a compact and interpretable manifold representation, enabling both zero-shot deployment and fine-grained instance-level adaptation. Across 15 benchmarks and 4 LLMs of varying scales and architectures, EDRM consistently outperforms static baselines. At the dataset level, EDRM achieves 41–55\% token reduction while improving accuracy with as few as 50 calibration samples. At the instance level, it further improves accuracy by up to 4.7\% while maintaining 27–45\% token savings. These results suggest that reasoning should be invoked selectively rather than by default, and demonstrate the effectiveness of entropy-driven decoding control for efficient and adaptive LLM inference.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Unifying Learning Dynamics and Generalization in Transformers Scaling Law

Authors:
Chiwun Yang↗

The scaling law, a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) development, predicts improvements in model performance with increasing computational resources. Yet, while empirically validated, its theoretical underpinnings remain poorly understood. This work formalizes the learning dynamics of transformer-based language models as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) system, then approximates this process to kernel behaviors. Departing from prior toy-model analyses, we rigorously analyze stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training for multi-layer transformers on sequence-to-sequence data with arbitrary data distribution, closely mirroring real-world conditions. Our analysis characterizes the convergence of generalization error to the irreducible risk as computational resources scale with data, especially during the optimization process. We establish matching upper and lower bounds on the excess risk, characterized by a distinct phase transition. In the initial optimization phase, the excess risk decays exponentially relative to the computational cost ${\sf C}$. However, once a specific resource allocation threshold is crossed, the system enters a statistical phase, where the generalization error follows a power-law decay of $\Theta(\mathsf{C}^{-1/7})$. These rates are certified by complementary lower bounds – statistical, via an information-theoretic two-point reduction, and optimization-side, via a first-order oracle argument – rendering the two-stage law tight up to constants, logarithmic factors, and a condition-number gap. Beyond this unified framework, our theory derives isolated scaling laws for model size, training time, and dataset size, elucidating how each variable independently governs the bounds of generalization.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Authors:
Maksim Shaposhnikov↗Nicolas Fortuin↗Simon Stipcich↗Maria I. Gorinova↗Amy Heineike↗Rob Willoughby↗

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Body composition subphenotypes, cardiometabolic risk and incident outcomes: validation in the population-based NAKO and UK Biobank imaging cohorts

Authors:
Grune↗Haueise↗von Itter↗M.-N↗Jung↗Bamberg↗Bibi↗Friedrich↗C. M↗Fromherz↗Kauczor↗H.-U↗…

Background Anthropometric measures do not adequately capture heterogeneity in body fat distribution and corresponding cardiometabolic risk, whereas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables precise differentiation and quantification of adipose tissue compartments and ectopic fat. We aimed to validate previously derived MRI-based body composition subphenotypes and their cardiometabolic risk profiles in two independent European cohorts. Methods Using deep learning-based image analysis, we quantified bone marrow, visceral, subcutaneous, cardiac, renal sinus, hepatic, skeletal muscle, and pancreatic fat in the imaging substudies of two population-based cohorts: the German National Cohort (NAKO, N=29,314, age range 19-74 years) and the UK Biobank (N=36,109, age range 40-69 years). Body composition subphenotypes, previously identified by k-means clustering, were evaluated using a rigorous statistical cluster validation framework with method-based and results-based approaches. In NAKO, cross-sectional associations between subphenotypes and estimated cardiovascular disease risk scores were examined using linear regression. In UK Biobank, longitudinal associations between subphenotypes and incident cardiometabolic outcomes, ascertained through hospital record linkage, were analysed using Cox regression. Findings All five body composition subphenotypes were robustly validated across both cohorts, and showed distinct fat distribution patterns and cardiometabolic risk profiles: I "lean", II "average adiposity", III "bone and muscle adiposity", IV "hepato-abdominal adiposity", and V "general and pancreatic adiposity". Subphenotypes I-III showed progressive adipose tissue remodelling patterns likely reflecting ageing trajectories. The "hepato-abdominal adiposity" subphenotype showed highest risk of incident diabetes, whereas the "general and pancreatic adiposity" subphenotype showed highest overall cardiovascular disease burden and metabolic impairment. Interpretation MRI-derived body composition subphenotypes represent distinct fat distribution patterns that reflect ageing- and disease-related processes, which supports the potential of body composition phenotyping for improved cardiometabolic risk stratification and targeted prevention.

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