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

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

arXiv:2605.27599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. We recently demonstrated that orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost, with workflows consuming 4.33x more energy per successful goal than linear baselines and OOI reaching 7.63x for multi-step reasoning tasks. Separately, Raj et al. show that CPU-side processing accounts for up to 90.6% of total latency and 44% of total dynamic energy in agentic workloads. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

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

PhyloSDF: Phylogenetically-Conditioned Neural Generation of 3D Skull Morphology via Residual Flow Matching

Generating novel, biologically plausible three-dimensional morphological structures is a fundamental challenge in computational evolutionary biology, hampered by extreme data scarcity and the requirement that generated shapes respect phylogenetic relationships among species. In this work, we present PhyloSDF, a phylogenetically-conditioned neural generative model for 3D biological morphology that integrates two innovations: (1) a DeepSDF auto-decoder regularized by a novel Phylogenetic Consistency Loss that structures the latent space to correlate with evolutionary distances (Pearson r=0.993); (2) a Residual Conditional Flow Matching (Residual CFM) architecture that factorizes generation into analytic species-centroid lookup and learned residual prediction, enabling generation from as few as ~4 specimens per species. We evaluate PhyloSDF on 100 micro-CT-scanned skulls of Darwin's Finches and their relatives across 24 species. The model generates novel meshes achieving 88-129% of real intra-species variation at the code level, with all 180 generated meshes verified as non-memorized. Residual CFM surpasses denoising diffusion (which fails entirely at this scale), standard flow matching (which mode-collapses to 3-6% variation), and a Gaussian mixture baseline in both fidelity (Chamfer Distance 0.00181 vs. 0.00190) and morphometric Fr\'{e}chet distance (10,641 vs. 13,322). Leave-one-species-out experiments across 18 species demonstrate phylogenetic extrapolation capability, and smooth latent interpolations produce biologically plausible ancestral skull reconstructions.

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

Attention as Frustrated Synchronization

A network of oscillators that synchronizes perfectly computes nothing further, so an attention architecture built from synchronization must locate its computation in structured departures from agreement. We introduce the Frustrated Synchronization Network (FSN), whose token states are phases on a torus and whose entire value pathway is one learned complex coupling kernel over harmonics and a one-step delay. Each component of the kernel is a frustration in the sense of the synchronization literature. The complex phases are static Kuramoto-Sakaguchi frustration angles, the signed harmonics are repulsive Daido components, and the delay term, which couples each token to the successors of the tokens it attends to, is algebraically identical to Kuramoto-Sakaguchi coupling whose frustration angle is the data's own transition, so next-token prediction is implemented as synchronization frustrated by the data. At matched one-million-parameter and training budgets on character-level text and code, the FSN's validation loss is below a tuned RoPE-SwiGLU transformer's at every epoch measured, and the comparison survives training the baseline to convergence: every thirty-epoch enwik8 seed finishes below the transformer's converged fifty-epoch loss of 1.611, and the FSN's completed fifty-epoch runs converge to 1.5953 +/- 0.0014. A variant with every feed-forward block replaced by mean-field coupling to learned collective modes, leaving no multilayer perceptron in the stack, tracks the transformer. On natural text the unfrustrated base layer falls behind the converged transformer at every copy depth, worst on long-range copy events; the kernel reverses the deficit at every depth of four and beyond. Headline comparisons are at the one-million-parameter scale; a scale ladder is complete through four million parameters with the advantage persisting, and remaining arms are marked as in progress.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Morse Transform for Discrete Shape Analysis

arXiv:2503.04507v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The geometry of an object plays a vital role in modulating its interactions with the physical world. It nevertheless remains difficult to describe geometric information numerically for the purposes of statistical inference or classification tasks. Here, we introduce a new topological transform which leverages directional piecewise-linear Morse theory to quantify the geometry of an embedded object by cataloguing critical points across multiple height-functions. The output of this Morse transform records both the heights and the local topological type (peak, trough or saddle) of the critical points that characterise the underlying shape, retaining finer information than the Euler characteristic transform whilst naturally prioritising a shape's outermost regions. Crucially, this output can be further compressed into a rich but compact feature vector. We benchmark the Morse feature vector as a descriptor for ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS), which intrinsically depends on the shape of molecules. Under a common gradient-boosted tree classification pipeline, Morse descriptors achieve the highest mean AUROC when compared to other topological transform descriptors and to standard shape-based LBVS descriptors.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

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

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex

Mitochondria regulate cellular processes through direct and indirect interactions with other organelles. A well-studied example has been contact with the endoplasmic reticulum at mitochondrial-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes1, which control pathways including redox and calcium homeostasis2,3. Recent studies have also reported direct mitochondria–nuclear membrane contacts in cancer cells and yeast that promote pro-survival signalling4,5. Here we identify direct interactions between mitochondria and nuclear pores. Using two unbiased proteomic screens, GST pulldown and BioID, we found that VDAC1 was the top mitochondrial candidate that interacts with the filamentous nuclear pore protein RANBP2. In vitro RANBP2 CRISPR knockout, RANBP2 truncation or site-directed mutagenesis of RANBP2–VDAC1 interacting amino acids resulted in reduced mitochondria–nucleus proximity and decreased nuclear ATP and phosphocreatine levels. This was accompanied by a decline in the levels of the nuclear phosphoproteome and downregulation of pathways involved in histone modification, cellular differentiation and transcriptional regulation in vitro. Moreover, deletion of the RANBP2 C-terminal domain in vivo in mice resulted in embryonic lethality due to cardiac and neural crest differentiation defects. Collectively, these results describe a mechanism by which mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex, a phenomenon critical for regulation of nuclear energetics and cellular differentiation. Undoubtedly, additional roles of this interaction remain to be revealed. Mitochondria interact directly with the nuclear pore complex via VDAC1–RANBP2 binding to sustain nuclear ATP levels.

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

Photon: Federated LLM Pre-Training

arXiv:2411.02908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) demands extensive data and computing resources, which are traditionally constrained to data centers by the high-bandwidth requirements of distributed training. Low-bandwidth methods like federated learning (FL) could enable collaborative training of larger models across weakly-connected GPUs if they can effectively be used for pre-training. To achieve this, we introduce Photon, the first complete system for federated end-to-end LLM training, leveraging cross-silo FL for global-scale training with minimal communication overheads. Using Photon, we train the first federated family of decoder-only LLMs from scratch. We show that: (1) Photon can train model sizes up to 7B in a federated fashion while reaching an even better perplexity than centralized pre-training; (2) Photon model training time decreases with available compute, achieving a similar compute-time trade-off to centralized; and (3) Photon outperforms the wall-time of baseline distributed training methods by 35% via communicating 64x-512xless. Our proposal is robust to data heterogeneity and converges twice as fast as previous methods like DiLoCo. This surprising data efficiency stems from a unique approach combining small client batch sizes with extremely high learning rates, enabled by federated averaging's robustness to hyperparameters. Photon thus represents the first economical system for global internet-wide LLM pre-training.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterizing the genetic basis of Cardio-Renal-Metabolic multimorbidity using multivariate genomic modelling

Cardio-renal-metabolic multimorbidity (CRMM) encompasses interrelated conditions affecting the heart, kidneys, and metabolic systems. Although the genetics of individual components are well studied, their shared architecture remains unclear. Here, we performed the largest multi-ancestry multivariate GWAS of CRMM across seven biobanks, including individuals of European (EUR; neff = 353,130), African (AFR; neff = 75,436), and East Asian (EAS; neff = 164,373) ancestry. We identified 287 lead loci in EUR, 30 in AFR, and 202 in EAS. Cross-ancestry analyses revealed ancestry-specific signals and 24 shared loci mapping to FTO and TCF7L2. Drug-repurposing highlighted candidates used for type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Mendelian randomization supported causal links with diverse diseases, while polygenic risk scores showed improved prediction across ancestries. Collectively, these findings advance understanding of CRMM genetics and inform precision medicine.

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

CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection

Vision-language reinforcement learning has recently shown strong target-present localization for camouflaged object detection (COD). Yet localization is only one side of the decision: when the agent faces an ordinary image with no camouflaged target, will it still claim that a camouflaged object exists? Standard COD training and evaluation data are positive-only, so agents optimized under this setting can acquire an over-detect bias, a task-specific form of object hallucination that standard COD evaluation leaves unmeasured. To quantify this target-absent behavior, we construct Counterfactual COD (CF-COD), a paired benchmark that removes the camouflaged target from each held-out COD evaluation image while preserving a plausible background. CF-COD evaluates whether a model detects the target on the original image and abstains on the target-absent counterfactual, summarized by Pair Accuracy (PA). We further introduce CFCamo, a paired counterfactual framework for COD with abstention. For training, CFCamo optimizes a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct agent with Counterfactual Sequence Policy Optimization (CSPO), which samples paired original-counterfactual rollouts and uses a Counterfactual Paired Reward (CPR) to couple original-image detection with counterfactual abstention. On CAMO-test, CFCamo improves S_alpha by +3.7 pp over the prior RL-based COD baseline; across CF-COD, it reaches 80.0-90.8% PA. Ablations show that removing counterfactual coupling reduces PA to 1.4-5.2% despite strong target-present COD scores, showing that target-present evaluation alone does not characterize detect-or-abstain behavior. Overall, these results indicate that CFCamo improves COD agents by coupling target-present detection with target-absent abstention, rather than merely strengthening target-present localization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/suhang2000/CFCamo.

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

TSAssistant: A Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Framework for Automated Target Safety Assessment

Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

15.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

作者: 未知作者

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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

SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision

arXiv:2606.01139v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates, it retains the first verifier-passing skill within the revision budget and falls back to empirical utility only when no candidate succeeds. Evaluated across three benchmarks and five LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills transfer across both executors and task environments, suggesting that SkillRevise captures reusable procedural knowledge beyond any single executor.

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

Selecting Samples on Graphs: A Unified Dataset Pruning Framework for Lossless Training Acceleration

The rapid growth of modern training datasets has significantly increased computational cost, motivating dataset pruning~(DP) methods which retain only a subset of informative samples to reduce training cost. Existing pruning criteria typically rely on either intrinsic signals that assess samples independently or extrinsic signals that promote diversity via pairwise relations. While effective in their own specific regimes, each captures only one aspect of sample utility and lacks robustness across different pruning ratios or data distribution. In this work, we present a unified graph-based DP framework. By modeling the dataset as a weighted graph, where node weights encode intrinsic value and edge weights encode extrinsic value, DP can be cast as a Maximum Weight Clique Problem (MWCP). Although MWCP is NP-hard, its structure admits a principled greedy solution based on sample-wise marginal gains. Under a few mild conditions, we further prove that this unified objective enjoys a formal approximation guarantee, which applies to a broad family of importance metrics and provides practical design guidelines. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing DP methods while substantially reducing training cost, reducing training time by over 40\% without sacrificing accuracy on ImageNet-1k with ResNet-50.

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

FlexLAM: Resolving the Bottleneck Trade-off in Latent Action Learning

arXiv:2606.19408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent actions provide a compact interface between action-free video and downstream decision-making, yet existing Latent Action Models (LAMs) force every transition through a fixed-capacity bottleneck. We identify a bottleneck trade-off: overly tight codes can discard transition cues needed for action alignment, while overly loose codes preserve additional transition variation that must be resolved when alignment labels are scarce or narrowly distributed. FlexLAM replaces this fixed capacity with variable-length latent actions trained by nested dropout, yielding prefix-valid codes that capture compact transition structure first and add detail only when needed, without new architectures or losses. A single FlexLAM matches or surpasses separately trained fixed-capacity LAMs at every evaluated token budget under standard scarce-label supervision and under a low-return single-task alignment stress test, indicating that FlexLAM is not merely adjustable at inference time but learns a better latent-action interface at the same token budgets. The same model supports inference-time token-budget adjustment without retraining, and FlexLAM improves Ego4D transition reconstruction. These results suggest that variable-length latent actions are an architecture-free, drop-in upgrade to the fixed-capacity bottleneck in latent action models, latent-action world models, and video-pretrained action interfaces.

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

Feature-preserving Latent-EnKF for Data Assimilation of Flows with Shocks

arXiv:2606.12559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is widely adopted for sequential data assimilation, but fails for solutions with discontinuities, such as shocks in compressible flows. Uncertainty in shock location induces multimodal ensemble statistics that violate the Gaussian assumptions underlying the EnKF, producing large-scale spurious oscillations in the analysis state. We introduce a feature-preserving latent-EnKF that performs the ensemble update in a learned low-dimensional latent space, where shock and flow features admit a smooth manifold representation, thereby preserving sharp features during EnKF analysis. The updated latent state is mapped back to physical state through a shared decoder for all ensemble members. The algorithm eliminates the member-specific ordered training and positivity flooring used in prior approaches. Numerical experiments on a Sod shock tube and Mach 2 shock interaction with a 2D cylinder, using sparse and noisy observations, show accurate feature recovery of shocks and contact discontinuities without spurious oscillations.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Theory of the correlated quantum Zeno effect in a monitored qubit dimer

arXiv:2503.22846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We theoretically investigate the stochastic dynamics of two qubits subject to one- and two-site correlated continuous weak measurements. When measurements dominate over the local unitary evolution, the system's dynamics is constrained and part of the physical Hilbert space becomes inaccessible: a typical signature of the Quantum Zeno (QZ) effect. In this work, we show how the competition between these two measurement processes give rise to two distinct QZ regimes, we dubbed standard and correlated, characterised by a different topology of the allowed region of the physical Hilbert space being a simply and non-simply connected domain, respectively. We develop a theory based on a stochastic Gutzwiller ansatz for the wavefunction that is able to capture the structure of the phase diagram. Finally we show how the two QZ regimes are intimately connected to the topology of the flow of the underlying non-Hermitian Hamiltonian governing the no-click evolution.

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

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

arXiv:2606.19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PatchWorld: Gradient-Free Optimization of Executable World Models

Text-agent environments are typically modeled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), assuming that the simulator's latent state and transition dynamics are hidden from the agent. Yet little work has examined whether executable code can be induced to serve as a world model for prediction and planning under partial observability. We introduce PatchWorld, a gradient-free framework that turns offline trajectories into executable Python world models through counterexample-guided code repair. Instead of predicting the next observation with a black-box model, PatchWorld induces symbolic belief-state programs whose action updates can be inspected, replayed, and locally patched. Across seven AgentGym environments, PatchWorld-Simple achieves the highest code-based planning score among evaluated methods, reaching 76.4\% macro success in live one-step lookahead while invoking no LLM calls inside the world-model prediction module itself. We further find that a human-specified residual-memory bias improves surface observation fidelity but weakens decision utility. This exposes a tradeoff in executable world models, since improving observation fidelity can come at the expense of action-discriminative dynamics, and vice versa. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/PatchWorld.

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

Constrained hybrid modelling to predict microbial dynamics and organic matter turnover in soil systems

arXiv:2606.20329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil microorganisms control organic matter cycling and largely determine how soil systems can cope with and mitigate climate change and environmental threats. Representing microbial dynamics in process-based soil models is therefore critical to predict carbon cycling in soils, albeit highly challenging to inform from data. One promising approach to improve their parametrisation is the integration of genomic data, yet modelling the complex and unknown relationship between genomes and the processes the microbes are driving is an unsolved problem. In this work, we present the first hybrid modeling framework for deriving biokinetic parameter values of a process-based soil organic matter turnover model from metagenome-inferred functional traits based on DNA sequencing data. Our model predicts biokinetic parameters of the process-based model from genomic trait data with a neural network and integrates constraints from ecological theory and literature to ensure realistic behavior, even of non-observed state variables. We evaluate our method on synthetic genomic trait datasets of varying complexity and on real data, showing that our approach improves performance over multiple baselines and learns the dynamics of unmeasurable components of the process-based model effectively, even for small training datasets.

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

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ALAS: An Automatic Latent Alignment Score for Audio Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are extended into Speech-LLMs, and the quality of the audio–text alignment they learn affects most downstream Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) behavior. Yet despite a growth of fusion strategies, there is no standard way to measure how well a Speech-LLM internally binds audio frames to text tokens. We introduce ALAS (Automatic Latent Alignment Score), a model and task-agnostic metric that probes the LLM's per-layer hidden states, scoring the cross-modal cosine similarity between audio and text representations against a Whisper-derived reference. ALAS needs only a frozen forward pass and an off-the-shelf ASR reference, with no training or fitted classifier, and is calibrated to an interpretable uniform baseline comparable across tasks. Applying ALAS to four open-source Speech-LLMs (AF3, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen-Omni, SALMONN) across emotion recognition (IEMOCAP), open-ended SQA (LibriSQA), and multi-choice audio understanding (MMAU-speech), we find that the depth and strength of alignment reflect each model's audio-encoder design and the acoustic-versus-semantic demands of the task, and that ALAS tracks but does not duplicate task accuracy, exposing models that score well without genuinely grounding in the audio. We release ALAS as an open-source library so that practitioners can probe their own Speech-LLMs or try it on new tasks.