Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Ranking-optimized survival models can underperform fixed-horizon clinical prediction: a SUPPORT2 reanalysis of machine learning, attending-physician judgment, and the original SUPPORT model at 60- and 180-day mortality

Machine-learning survival models are increasingly proposed for intensive-care mortality prediction and are almost always selected and reported using the concordance index, a ranking metric averaged over follow-up. Yet most bedside decisions hinge on a probability at a specific time, such as 60- or 180-day mortality. We asked whether ranking-optimized models remain competitive at fixed clinical horizons against two reference points clinicians actually rely on: unaided attending-physician judgment and the original 1995 SUPPORT logistic model. Reanalyzing the SUPPORT2 cohort (9,105 critically ill adults from five United States centers, 1989-1994) under a stratified 70/15/15 split, we compared a gradient-boosted survival model, the physician's recorded prognosis, and the 1995 model at 60 and 180 days, alongside several alternative learners. The survival model achieved competitive ranking concordance (0.705) yet underperformed both comparators at fixed horizons: at 60 days its area under the ROC curve was 0.750, against 0.808 for physicians on the matched sample and 0.827 for the 1995 model, a gap that held across eight independent data splits and remained statistically reliable after multiplicity correction. The shortfall was not miscalibration, since post-hoc recalibration left discrimination unchanged, nor limited capacity, since neural networks, a deep ranking model, and two timepoint-aware discrete-time models also failed to close it; replacing the ranking objective with timepoint-matched binary training recovered roughly half the gap, pointing to an objective-horizon mismatch. Discrimination was equitable across sex, race, and age, but leave-one-disease-out validation exposed severe failure for disease groups absent from training, and the physician advantage was conditional on a physician electing to provide an estimate. We recommend reporting timepoint-specific discrimination alongside concordance, timepoint-matched training when fixed-horizon predictions drive care, leave-one-subgroup validation, and distribution-free prediction intervals to support selective deployment.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

GEOAgent: An AI-driven Autonomous Framework for Intelligent GEO Data Retrieval and Standardized Preprocessing

Datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) remain difficult to reuse at scale because sample annotations are heterogeneous and raw sequencing data require assay-specific preprocessing. We present GEOAgent, an AI-driven autonomous framework designed for intelligent dataset retrieval and standardized preprocessing by coupling autonomous semantic governance with an automated Nextflow pipeline named bioStream. Metadata from 181,760 sequencing series and 84,756 associated PubMed records were organized in a relational database and semantic index to support natural-language dataset retrieval. The framework automatically determines assay modalities, resolves experimental design pairings, and standardizes sample naming to minimize manual curation overhead. Based on these parsed attributes, the framework generates deployment-ready manifests to automatically execute containerized workflows across bulk and single-cell omics modalities. In expert-curated benchmarks, the workflow achieved 96% retrieval precision alongside 100% accuracy in assay classification and sample relationship resolution. The web platform is publicly accessible, while the source code and associated databases are openly available via GitHub and Zenodo.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Polygenic risk scores associate with asthma phenotypes and proteomic analyses implicate IL1R1 in two family-based studies

Despite its high prevalence and the discovery of hundreds of genetic associations, the genetic determinants and heterogeneous manifestations of asthma remain incompletely understood. Incorporating polygenic risk scores (PRS) into asthma research offers a powerful approach to quantify inherited susceptibility, refine risk profiles, and advance mechanistic understanding of disease development. For this study, we leveraged whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data from two family-based cohorts of childhood asthma - the Genetics of Asthma in Costa Rica Study (GACRS) and the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) - to examine the transmission profiles of externally derived asthma PRS and their associations with clinical phenotypes in children with asthma. To further elucidate molecular mechanisms, we integrated large-scale external genome-wide association study (GWAS) summary statistics and genetic prediction models of protein abundance in a two-step proteome-wide association study (PWAS) of asthma. Our findings provide robust evidence supporting the validity of externally derived asthma PRS (asthma PRS association p-value p={10}^{-24} [GACRS and CAMP trios combined] for the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative [GBMI]) and reveal consistent associations with spirometry measures and atopy markers across both studies, as 13 of 21 traits (62%) were significantly associated with the GBMI-PRS in the meta-analysis after multiple-testing correction. Moreover, the results of the integrative proteomic analysis implicate IL-1 signaling in the etiology of asthma, reinforcing the candidacy of IL1R1 antagonists for drug repurposing.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

BASENet: Band-Adapted Speech Enhancement Network with Cross-Band Attention

arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Morpho-FM: spatial molecular reconstruction from routine H&E histology using transcriptomic foundation-model priors

Routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) histology captures tissue architecture at clinical scale, but lacks a direct molecular readout of the transcriptional programmes that organise tumour epithelium, stroma, vasculature and immune compartments. Spatial transcriptomics provides this context, yet cost, workflow complexity and sparse sampling limit routine use. Most existing histology-to-expression models are trained de novo on small paired cohorts and therefore remain weakly constrained when extrapolating from sparse measurements to dense, tissue-wide molecular maps. Here we introduce Morpho-FM, a weakly supervised framework that predicts spatial gene expression from routine H&E whole-slide images by conditioning a pretrained single-cell transcriptomic foundation-model prior on local histological neighbourhoods. A lightweight morphology-to-transcriptome adapter maps cached whole-slide histology features into a transcriptomic decoder, enabling prediction at measured locations, dense full-section reconstruction, and re-aggregation to the original measurement support. Across harmonized prostate cancer benchmarks, Morpho-FM achieved the strongest overall performance among five representative methods, reaching mean per-gene Pearson correlations of 0.286 in rotating single-slide evaluation and 0.298 in multi-slide held-out validation. The framework reproduced this advantage across kidney cancer sections, achieved a mean correlation of 0.210 across 56 directed single-slide evaluations and retained measurable predictive signal after external transfer to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma sections. Controlled ablation analyses identified pretrained transcriptomic initialization as a reproducible source of performance gain exceeding that attributable to changes in the histology feature backbone. Beyond predictive accuracy benchmarks, Morpho-FM recovered ERBB2-enriched tumour compartments, boundary-associated molecular gradients, and annotation-aligned tissue domains across Xenium and HER2ST breast cancer datasets. Together, these results support transcriptomic foundation-model priors as an effective constraint for morphology-conditioned molecular decoding and demonstrate the potential of Morpho-FM to extend spatial transcriptomic insight across routine pathology sections.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

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

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

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Masked Neural Detection for Constrained Channel Coding in Molecular Communication

arXiv:2606.12489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular communication (MC) suffers from severe diffusion memory because molecules released for one symbol may arrive during later symbols. Neural sequence detectors, especially sliding bidirectional recurrent neural networks (SBRNNs), can substantially outperform threshold detectors in such channels. This raises a central question for MC channel coding: does a code whose advantage was established under threshold detection retain it when both coded and uncoded transmission are evaluated with neural detection? This letter answers this question for run-length-limited ISI-mitigation (RLIM) codes, a class of constrained codes previously shown to provide large BER gains in MC. Across the tested operating points, the best RLIM-SBRNN receiver beats the best uncoded receiver, chosen between threshold and SBRNN detection, in $46$ of $59$ cases, with a mean gain of $10.36\times$ over those wins. We also propose an RLIM-tailored training mask for compact SBRNN detectors, improving the unmasked RLIM-SBRNN in $227$ of $236$ comparisons with $3.267\times$ mean gain when masking is beneficial. Finally, the compact masked RLIM-SBRNN is competitive with channel-state-aware MLSE despite using no channel knowledge.

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

NeuralMUSIC: A Hybrid Neural-Subspace Framework for Robot Sound Source Localization

arXiv:2606.18664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable sound source localization is fundamental to robot audition, enabling autonomous robots to perceive spatial cues and operate effectively in dynamic environments. Classical methods such as Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) offer strong theoretical foundations but degrade under low signal-to-noise ratios. While deep learning-based approaches achieve promising performance, they often struggle with limited generalization across conditions. To address these challenges, we propose NeuralMUSIC, a hybrid neural-subspace framework for robotic sound source localization. Specifically, a neural network first estimates the spatial covariance matrix from multichannel microphone observations. The predicted covariance is then integrated into a classical MUSIC pipeline with eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) and pseudo-spectrum computation, followed by a Frequency Attention Fusion (FAF) module to produce the final DOA estimates. To improve data efficiency, we further introduce a Self-supervised Spatial Correlation Learning (SSCL) strategy that leverages unlabeled acoustic data to capture spatial structure. Extensive experiments across different robotic tasks demonstrate that NeuralMUSIC achieves competitive localization accuracy while exhibiting improved robustness and cross-domain generalization.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

sebis at CRF Filling 2026: A Two-Stage Local LLM Pipeline for Medical CRF Filling

The extraction of structured clinical information from unstructured EHR notes is a persistent bottleneck in healthcare informatics. While large language models (LLMs) offer high performance, their deployment in clinical settings is hindered by privacy risks, inference costs, and the tendency to hallucinate beyond textual evidence. We address these challenges for the CL4Health 2026 Case Report Form (CRF) filling task by proposing a fully local, domain-adapted pipeline using the MedGemma-27B model. Our two-stage architecture, which separates binary presence classification from value extraction, enforces strict adherence to textual evidence and ensures deterministic outputs for negated, uncertain, or unknown states. By leveraging item-specific, few-shot in-context learning without external API calls or fine-tuning, our approach achieves a macro-F1 score of 0.55 on the official English test track. This result secures second place among all locally-hosted, open-source submissions. Our work demonstrates that privacy-preserving, on-premise LLM pipelines can achieve near-competitive performance with proprietary frontier models, providing a practical, data-sovereign framework for clinical NLP.

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

FDIO: Frequency Decomposed Inertial Odometry

Pedestrian inertial odometry (PIO) estimates autonomous pedestrian motion using only acceleration and angular velocity measurements collected by an inertial measurement unit (IMU), making it highly valuable for consumer level localization applications. However, under a dual device acquisition setting, IMU signals collected by a freely carried mobile device are inherently composite signals in which the global motion of the human torso is coupled with perturbations induced by local limb motion. This coupling makes accurate human motion modeling more challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes frequency decomposed inertial odometry (FDIO). The proposed method first decomposes input IMU signals into low frequency and high frequency components using a Laplacian pyramid. It then adopts a Mamba module to model long range motion information from the low frequency component and uses a multi scale convolution module to extract fine grained local dynamic features from the high frequency component. Experiments on five public PIO datasets show that FDIO achieves an average absolute trajectory error of 3.221~m and an average relative trajectory error of 2.550~m, reducing the errors by 33.3\% and 16.7\% compared with the RoNIN ResNet baseline, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed frequency decomposition strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first efforts to introduce Mamba and a frequency decomposition architecture into inertial odometry.

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

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FlowBender: Feedback-Aware Training for Self-Correcting Conditional Flows

Conditional diffusion and flow models routinely fail to satisfy the very constraints that define their task. For instance, a depth-conditioned model often produces images whose re-extracted depth disagrees with the input, even though the forward operator–the depth predictor defining the constraint–is available during both training and inference. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: supervised models that treat the conditioning signal as a static cue and ignore alignment information at inference, and guidance-based methods that consult it through hand-tuned linear updates, typically trading fidelity to the condition against the plausibility of the generated sample. We argue that the fundamental gap in both paradigms is that the model is never trained to utilize its own alignment error. We introduce FlowBender, a closed-loop framework that treats this error as a first-class input, training the network to learn a correction policy conditioned on inference-time feedback. At each step, an unguided look-ahead pass estimates the clean signal, a task-specific deviation is computed via the forward operator, and a refinement pass consumes this signal to produce a corrected velocity. We propose several variants of FlowBender, including a gradient-based formulation for differentiable operators and a zero-order variant for non-differentiable settings such as JPEG compression. For efficient sampling, we introduce a prior-step shortcut that enables closed-loop correction at a minimal additional computational cost. Across image-to-image translation, restoration, and 3D mesh texturing, FlowBender consistently outperforms standard supervised baselines, alignment-loss-augmented training, and state-of-the-art inference-time guidance, improving fidelity and plausibility simultaneously rather than trading them against each other. Project page: https://flow-bender.github.io/

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

ScaleWoB: Guiding GUI Agents with Coding Agents via Large-Scale Environmental Synthesis

arXiv:2605.25160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: GUI agents powered by large language models are advancing rapidly, creating urgent needs for evaluation and training based on realistic environments. However, directly doing so in real-world environments introduces some challenges that cannot be overlooked. Real-world environments are complex and uncontrollable, making it difficult to construct verifiable rewards and to save or reset states. Existing works prioritize reproducibility but are often limited to open-source apps or file-operation tasks for reliable reward building, leaving a persistent gap from real-world usage. Furthermore, relying on virtual machines or docker images demand high resource requirements and suffer from slow response speeds, which limit the efficiency. We present \sys, a framework that could produce high-fidelity synthesized interactive environments for GUI agents across platforms with verifiable rewards. These environments behave as backend-free webpages accessible via URL, requiring near-zero setup and low resource cost, making the approach suitable for both large-scale evaluation and downstream agent training. We support multiple GUI platforms including mobile, desktop, and automotive/in-vehicle interfaces based on the same pipeline, covering 100+ environments and 1000+ verifiable tasks. Among them, 120 challenging tasks across 63 simulated mobile applications are released as a fully synthesized mobile GUI agent benchmark. Experiment results on five state-of-the-art mobile GUI agents reveal substantial headroom – the average success rate is only 27.92\%, dropping to 17.82\% on long-horizon subset – while humans reach 92.08\%. A comparison against real-world sample tasks shows that assessments made in our synthetic environments generalize to real apps. The project website is at https://scalewob.github.io.

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

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606.19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal. The same signal drives RL with verifiable rewards, math data curation, synthetic curricula, and verifier training. We show this proxy has a persistent blind spot on its hardest stratum: on the eight free-form math cells we test (GSM8K and MATH across four open-weight models), 10.3-22.9% of the examples that no sampling seed solves in six tries are instead solved at matched compute by a six-chain deterministic regime. These are greedy decoding plus five cheap residual-stream perturbations applied via activation grafting, while greedy alone solves at most 6% on these math cells. Recovery scales with the additional budget, across perturbations whose mechanistic distinctness we verify across all twelve cells (cross-kind fix-set Jaccard

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

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

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

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Conditional Local Importance by Quantile Expectations

arXiv:2411.08821v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Global variable importance measures are commonly used to interpret the results of machine learning models. Local variable importance techniques assess how variables contribute to individual observations. Current, popular methods, including LIME and SHAP, provide useful measures of feature contribution in the prediction space, while leaving opportunities for improved characterization of local structure in the model loss space. Additionally, they are not natively adapted for multi-class classification problems. We propose a new model-agnostic method for calculating local variable importance, CLIQUE, that highlights locally dependent relationships, provides improved stability over permutation-based methods, and can be directly applied to multi-class classification problems. Simulated and real-world examples show that CLIQUE emphasizes locally dependent information, captures interaction behavior beyond what can be evaluated by correlations, and assigns zero importance in regions where the response is invariant to changes in variables.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Fidelity bounds for adiabatic gates and other quantum operations with time-dependent dissipation

arXiv:2606.20501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum-computing platforms are susceptible to noise, the fidelity of quantum operations is limited by decoherence. Understanding this limitation is crucial for building utility-scale quantum processors. In previous works [Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 150504 (2022); Quantum 9, 1684 (2025)], we presented analytical formulae for the average gate fidelity of multi-qubit operations under static Markovian noise processes, including operations that temporarily leave the computational subspace. However, some quantum-computing architectures dynamically modulate qubit or coupler frequencies to implement two-qubit gates, e.g., baseband flux gates; such modulation can lead to dissipation rates varying in time. In this Letter, we therefore generalize the fidelity-reduction formulae to encompass time-dependent dissipation. Applying our generalized formula, we obtain a fidelity bound for adiabatic operations and demonstrate that flux-dependent noise sensitivity, combined with qubit-coupler hybridization, significantly reduces the fidelity of adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates in superconducting quantum computers. Our work thus provides essential theoretical tools for evaluating error budgets and optimizing the design of quantum operations in tunable quantum-computing architectures, and may also find applications in quantum-sensing and quantum-communication protocols that are affected by time-dependent dissipation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MA-SBI: Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference via Side-Channel Guidance

arXiv:2606.16923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) of latent parameters is often hindered by simulator misspecification, the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, the recent state-of-the-art for robust SBI, addresses this through optimal transport between learned representations of real and simulated observations, but requires ground-truth parameter calibration pairs that are typically unavailable in the very settings where SBI is needed. What practitioners do have is unstructured side-information such as regime labels, instruction text, and policy bulletins. We propose Misspecification-Aware Simulation-Based Inference (MA-SBI), a calibration-free framework that turns this side-channel into a posterior correction. A learned corrector maps side-channel text to an observation-space shift applied before any pre-trained amortized posterior, requiring no retraining and no parameter ground-truth. Our main theorem bounds achievable bias reduction by the mutual information between misspecification and side-channel, with a non-vacuous constant that extends to all sub-Gaussian noise via Donsker-Varadhan. On hide-the-calibration benchmarks, MA-SBI with text alone matches the oracle posterior across 10 seeds and two backbones (TOST equivalence), while RoPE given more data does not. The two approaches are complementary: where misspecification is structural and recoverable from parameter pairs, RoPE dominates, as the theory predicts. A stochastic variant improves posterior-predictive log-likelihood on real COVID and OxCGRT epidemiological data, and correctly leaves the posterior unchanged on a well-specified cognitive-science corpus.