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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GarmentSketch: Large-scale Sketch-to-Fashion Benchmark

Fashion sketching is a cornerstone of design workflows, allowing rapid visualization of creative concepts prior to physical prototyping. Yet, progress in sketch-based fashion image synthesis has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, high-quality paired resources. To bridge this gap, we present GarmentSketch, a novel dataset comprising 26,249 fashion sketches across 21 garment categories, each paired with detailed textual descriptions. Captions were produced through a multi-stage pipeline that integrates multiple multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human-in-the-loop refinement, ensuring both semantic accuracy and descriptive richness. We benchmark GarmentSketch on state-of-the-art generative models, providing baseline performance for sketch-guided text-to-image generation. Our experiments reveal both the promise and the current limitations of existing methods. By offering a comprehensive and richly annotated resource, GarmentSketch establishes a foundation for advancing sketch understanding, fine-grained fashion image generation, and creative human-AI collaboration in design. The dataset will be available at: https://khangbdd.github.io/garmentsketch.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Vine Codes: Low-Overhead Quantum LDPC Codes on a Planar Square Grid

arXiv:2606.20263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The surface code is a promising route towards large-scale quantum computing, requiring only nearest-neighbour gates amenable to superconducting hardware. However, surface codes incur large qubit overheads. Novel quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) codes promise to reduce overheads but require long-range connections that are difficult to achieve on superconducting platforms. Here, we introduce "Vine Codes" - qLDPC codes that are implementable on a planar square grid through nearest-neighbour, two-qubit gates native to superconducting platforms (iSWAP and CZ). Our approach generalises "Directional Codes" recently introduced by Gehér et. al. (2025) which are constrained to a torus. In contrast, vine codes have open boundary conditions constructed with the aid of routing qubits. We perform extensive numeric searches and find promising candidate vine codes, e.g. [[121,4,6]], [[221,6,7]], and [[234,9,6]] codes. We verify the circuit distances and show that data and measure qubits required can be reduced by up to ~28% relative to the surface code at a circuit distance of 7. Even including routing qubits, vine codes require fewer total qubits than the surface code (e.g. ~18% reduction at circuit distance 10) and benefits are expected to increase at higher distances. We perform circuit-level noise simulations to demonstrate that under a realistic noise model and at a near-term noise rate of $10^{-3}$, vine codes can perform better than the surface code while using fewer qubits. We give an exhaustive list of all unique vine codes up to stabiliser-weight 9. We additionally introduce "Flip-Vine Codes" which possess single-qubit transversal Clifford gates useful for fault-tolerant logic and magic state cultivation. We furthermore construct examples of generalised open boundaries for vine codes that go beyond the familiar X/Z boundaries of the surface and tile codes.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Photon anti-bunching in high harmonic generation

arXiv:2606.17620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon anti-bunching is the direct evidence for the existence of photons without having a classical counterpart. Unlike bunching of photons, which can have a semi-classical description, the effect of photon anti-bunching can only be understood with quantized electromagnetic fields. However, for the process of high harmonic generation (HHG), where many photons of the driving field are upconverted to a single photon of higher energy, there is yet no clear evidence for the presence of individual photon emission. The key result of this work is the prediction of photon anti-bunching in the process of HHG, marking it the first theoretical discovery of non-classicality in the temporal correlations of HHG photons. While other non-classical signatures in HHG, such as sub-Poissonian statistics or squeezing, have been discussed for an ensemble of photons, the anti-bunching signature reported here is a signature of a single photon. This is achieved by using the recently developed Heisenberg picture approach for quantum optical HHG, revealing clear anti-bunching signatures in the intensity correlation function across the entire harmonic spectrum.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

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

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Dual-Granularity Orthogonal Disentanglement for Generalizable Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.16532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detectors often fail to generalize across speakers, as they learn speaker-identity features rather than synthesis artifacts, known as implicit identity leakage. Existing methods address this but incur architectural complexity or training instability. This paper proposes a dual-granularity orthogonal disentanglement framework enforcing feature independence at two levels: sample-level cosine orthogonality captures directional decorrelation, while batch-level cross-covariance regularization eliminates linear correlations across embedding dimensions. A curriculum disentanglement schedule progressively strengthens the orthogonality constraint without auxiliary networks or adversarial dynamics. Experiments on ASVspoof 2019 LA, ASVspoof 2021 DF, and In-the-Wild datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.35%, 7.88%, and 21.58% equal error rates (EER), respectively, surpassing gradient reversal disentanglement by 2.60% absolute on cross-dataset transfer.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Physics-informed generative AI for semiconductor manufacturing: Enforcing hard physical constraints in generative models by construction

arXiv:2606.11247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative models are increasingly used to propose designs, data, and control actions for physical systems, yet many such systems are governed by hard physical constraints rather than by perceptual plausibility. Semiconductor manufacturing provides a demanding test case: generated masks, layouts, synthetic defect data, and process recipes must obey lithography, transport, reaction, and device-physics constraints, because physically invalid samples are not merely low quality but unusable. This Perspective argues that semiconductor manufacturing exposes a broader computational-science challenge, namely that generative AI for constrained physical domains must be physics-informed by construction, not corrected only through post-hoc filtering. We survey the emerging architectural toolkit, including physics-informed diffusion, PDE-constrained variational models, neural-operator priors, and conservation-law-respecting generative networks, and show how it connects to differentiable lithography, TCAD, process simulation, and autonomous experimentation. We identify four integration patterns between generative models and physics-based simulators, and we propose a research agenda centered on physics-fidelity benchmarks, differentiable simulator infrastructure, and multimodal foundation models for physical design and manufacturing. The central claim is analytical rather than rhetorical: where physical validity is the binding criterion of success, architectures that enforce it by construction should be expected to outperform those that filter for it after the fact, and the fab is the setting where this distinction is sharpest.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

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

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

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

Uncertainty Estimation and Generalization Bounds for Modern Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.13818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This thesis investigates how Bayesian principles can deepen our understanding of modern deep learning systems. While neural networks achieve remarkable predictive performance, their ability to generalize and to quantify uncertainty remains only partly understood. This thesis approaches this challenge from both methodological and theoretical angles: unifying Bayesian inference, function-space modeling, and large-deviation theory under a common probabilistic perspective. On the methodological side, the thesis introduces the Deep Variational Implicit Process (DVIP), a scalable Bayesian framework that extends implicit processes to deep architectures. Complementing this, two post-hoc methods – the Variational Linearized Laplace Approximation (VaLLA) and the Fixed-Mean Gaussian Process (FMGP) – are proposed to equip pretrained deterministic networks with calibrated uncertainty estimates. The theoretical contributions focus on one of the central open questions in modern machine learning: why do large, over-parameterized neural networks generalize so well? To address this, the thesis develops a unified probabilistic framework that connects three key mechanisms – diversity, smoothness, and stochasticity – within the language of PAC-Bayesian and large-deviation theory.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Definition of Good Explanations and the Challenges Explaining LLM Outputs

arXiv:2606.14838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How to define a good explanation is a long-standing philosophical debate which has found recent renewed interest in the context of AI outputs. Explainability is crucial for AI adoption in many contexts, but in order to produce good explanations of AI systems, we must first have an understanding of what good explanations are. In this paper we propose a definition inspired by the notion of counterfactual explanations, however we argue that one must also take into account the interlocutor's prior beliefs in each fact that could be offered in an explanation. We explore the ramifications of this definition for AI explainability and, in particular, why LLM outputs are difficult to produce good explanations for.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Beyond phylogeny: Genome-wide DNA sequence patterns suggest DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation in extremophile microbes

Authors:

Temperature is a fundamental constraint on biological systems, yet how it is reflected in genome sequence organization remains unclear. Here, we show that genome-wide distributions of short DNA sequences contain a robust signal of thermal adaptation that is largely independent of phylogeny. Using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), a machine-learning approach for identifying groups of co-occurring sequence motifs, we analyze canonical 6-mer and 9-mer frequency profiles of bacterial and archaeal genome proxies (randomly sampled genomic regions) and identify motif families systematically associated with thermophiles and psychrophiles. In bacterial thermophiles, the identified motif families are dominated by highly specific, overrepresented and co-occurring C- and G-stacked hexamers, and a distinct family of CG-periodic hexamers recurring across multiple temperature comparisons. In contrast, bacterial psychrophile-associated motifs are dominated by low-complexity A-, T-, and AT-run hexamers. Thermophilic archaea generally exhibit a distinct CTAG-centred hexamer family, suggesting that different domains may adapt to similar environmental constraints through different sequence-level solutions. However, this domain-level contrast is not absolute: in a targeted analysis of two thermophilic bacterium–archaeon pairs, we find unusually similar frequencies of all the STM-identified thermophile-associated hexamer families, suggesting that shared high-temperature environments can, in specific cases, partially override phylogenetic divergence. Notably, the identified motif families constitute only a small and highly selective subset of the vast space of possible G+C-rich or A+T-rich sequences. This indicates that thermal adaptation is associated with specific sequence architectures rather than broad shifts in nucleotide composition. Accordingly, the observed signal cannot be explained by overall base composition alone, but instead arises from structured combinations and positional arrangements of nucleotides within short sequence contexts. Related motif families are recovered at both k=6 and k=9, indicating that the signal reflects systematic shifts in genome-wide sequence organization rather than isolated sequence motifs. These patterns are consistent with known sequence-dependent DNA physical properties documented in biochemical and biophysical studies, including differences in base-stacking interactions and conformational flexibility. Together, our results suggest that genome-wide sequence organization reflects sequence-dependent DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation, revealing a previously underappreciated physical layer of genomic information beyond phylogenetic history.

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

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. Existing approaches rely on a dictionary of activity label as input, cannot provide frame-by-frame labeling explanations, or rely on superseded computer vision techniques. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Data-driven Control with Real-time Uncertainty Compensation for Multi-Fuel Engines

arXiv:2606.16171v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression ignition (CI) engines offer superior power density and fuel flexibility. However, achieving consistent and optimal combustion phasing across a wide range of operating conditions remains a major challenge, particularly in the presence of modeling uncertainties. This paper presents a novel, data-driven real-time uncertainty compensation framework for combustion control in multi-fuel CI engines. The proposed approach introduces a pseudo-engine speed that enables dynamic adaptation of control inputs in response to uncertainty affecting the engine. To model the underlying combustion process, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model is first trained on available input-output data, capturing the nonlinear and fuel-dependent behavior across varying operating conditions. Control inputs are then synthesized through model inversion of the learned GPR surrogate and augmented with an uncertainty compensator designed to mitigate deviations caused by dynamic variations in operating conditions and model inaccuracies. This integrated control strategy allows for real-time input corrections within a finite number of combustion cycles. Theoretical analysis establishes finite-time convergence guarantees for the proposed controller. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method steers the combustion phasing to the desired value in real-time, providing a scalable and adaptive control solution for multi-fuel CI engine operation.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A tree-free approach to 3D Yang-Mills Langevin dynamic. Analytic estimates and the existence of a model for a regularity structure

arXiv:2605.14616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the multi-index approach to regularity structures due to F. Otto et al., we construct a regularity structure and a model for it associated to the stochastic Langevin equation for the 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills functional. For the model we also obtain global stochastic and global pointwise weighted Besov type estimates which hold almost surely. The model is defined as a limit of a sequence of smooth models introduced with the help of a mollified noise. When the mollification is removed the sequence converges in a certain topology defined with the help of the stochastic estimates. To obtain these results we develop the multi-index approach for systems of equations with vector-valued white noises. This project is motivated by the problem for constructing 3D Euclidean Yang-Mills measure and by the earlier results of the author on the related problem of canonical quantization of the Yang-Mills field on the Minkowski space.

19.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-11

Large-scale, spatially resolved panoramic CRISPR screening in native tissue environments using Perturb-DBiT

Authors:

Spatially resolved CRISPR screening in vivo has been limited to small perturbation panels and subsets of protein-coding RNAs. We present Perturb-DBiT, a method for co-sequencing of spatial total RNA whole transcriptomes and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) on the same tissue section in situ. In a human cancer metastatic colonization model, we applied large (80,000+) sgRNA panels across tumor colonies in multiple consecutive tissue sections alongside their corresponding total RNA transcriptomes. We linked perturbations affecting long noncoding RNA covariation, microRNA–mRNA interactions and distinct amino acid-specific tRNA alterations to tumor migration and growth. By integrating transcriptional pseudotime trajectories, we further observed the impact of perturbations on clonal dynamics and cooperation. In an immune-competent syngeneic mouse model, investigation of the tumor immune microenvironment indicated distinct, synergistic effects on immune infiltration and suppression. Perturb-DBiT provides a spatially resolved comprehensive view of perturbation responses in complex tissues, including small and large RNA regulation, tumor proliferation, migration, metastasis and immune interactions. In vivo CRISPR genetic perturbations are spatially mapped at scale.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Operator Learning for efficient Quantum Computation

arXiv:2606.20184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An efficient implementation of quantum algorithms is often hindered by the lack of efficient primitives for operators and state preparation. This limits both the ability of near-term quantum hardware to simulate complex problems and the potential of fault-tolerant algorithms to achieve practical quantum advantage. To address this, we propose a full-stack variational framework that transforms arbitrary operators to compact quantum circuits. The resulting variational circuits can be tailored to the connectivity and long-range interaction of the target hardware. The learning process employs backpropagation together with a cost function that efficiently optimizes unitary operators and non-unitary – dense or sparse – operators using only a single ancilla qubit for block encoding. Additionally, we introduce a regularization term that reduces the approximation error. The approach is validated for both quantum mechanical and engineering applications. In the former case, we learn propagators that arise in native quantum problems – such as quantum simulation and quantum chemistry – and achieve improved resource scaling in comparison to standard Suzuki-Trotter expansions. In the latter case, we demonstrate the approach's ability to implement the second-order central finite difference approximation of the Laplace operator – relevant for solving partial differential equations – while improving upon current error metrics. The final example deals with learning a dense, non-unitary operator that arises in the analysis of inviscid potential flow around an airfoil. This universality of the framework opens the door for solving general problems beyond prototypical engineering and quantum applications.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

GIST-CMTF: Goal-State Inference for Causal Minimal Tool Filtering in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents rely on runtime filtering to decide which tools should be visible at each step. Causal Minimal Tool Filtering (CMTF) reduces tool-choice confusion by exposing only the next causally necessary tool frontier, but it assumes that the user request has already been mapped to a symbolic goal state. In practice, requests such as "handle my appointment" or "take care of this email" may correspond to multiple possible goals. This creates wrong-goal execution, where an agent follows a valid causal tool path for an unintended objective. We introduce GIST-CMTF, a goal-state inference layer that predicts candidate symbolic goals over the same state-transition vocabulary used by CMTF, estimates ambiguity, and either applies CMTF or exposes clarification as a causal action that produces missing goal or state variables. We evaluate GIST-CMTF across seven model backends, six filtering methods, and 120 controlled tool-use tasks. GIST-CMTF achieves 97.0% task success, compared with 80.1% for top-goal CMTF and 82.9% for semantic-goal CMTF. It reduces wrong-goal execution from 19.4% under top-goal CMTF to 2.5%, while preserving the one-tool exposure of causal filtering and using substantially fewer tokens than all-tools exposure. These results suggest that reliable tool-augmented agents should validate goal state, not only tool relevance, before exposing external actions.

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

Beyond Self-Attention: Sub-Quadratic Vision Transformers for Fast Image Captioning

Image captioning is a challenging and significant task that aims to generate coherent and semantically meaningful textual descriptions for given images. To accomplish this task, it requires a deep understanding of visual content along with the ability to express that understanding in natural language. Despite remarkable progress with transformer-based architectures, existing approaches often suffer from limitations, such as a lack of rich local feature representations and the high computational cost of quadratic self-attention. The proposed model focuses on improving computational efficiency by restructuring the vision transformer architecture. In designing this approach, the standard self-attention mechanism in Vision Transformers is replaced with a probabilistic transformer approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), a soft-clustering technique. Instead of computing pairwise attention among all image patches, the model groups similar patches into a fixed number of clusters using an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. This clustering-based mechanism reduces the computational complexity from quadratic O(n^2) to linear O(nK), where K

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

Symplectic Transversality and Endpoint Green Estimates for Finite-Horizon Pontryagin Systems

arXiv:2606.17762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-uniform local branches of finite-horizon discrete-time Pontryagin boundary value systems after smooth control elimination. The central input is a two-point endpoint inverse for the linearization. We verify this inverse from scaled stable–unstable boundary transversality, prove the associated endpoint-corrected Green estimate, and combine it with weighted contractions to obtain existence, uniqueness, Lipschitz dependence, and first-order expansions with constants independent of the horizon. The framework covers smooth nonlinear endpoint maps, including the original Pontryagin rows that fix the initial state and couple the terminal costate to the terminal state. Symplectic and Riccati criteria verify the inverse hypothesis at the level of the matrix data; in particular, every stabilizable linear-quadratic system with invertible dynamics and definite weights is covered, including noncommuting coupled data. A numerical section illustrates the certificates and the horizon-uniform first-order expansion.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

Authors:

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling agents to learn targeted modifications while maintaining overall model performance. We evaluate the framework on bias mitigation in text classification and machine unlearning in image classification, both of which traditionally rely on specialized algorithms. Our results show that the learned policies reduce forget set accuracy to nearly 0% while preserving over 90% retain set accuracy on the unlearning task. In the bias mitigation setting, the learned policies improve bias-related performance by more than 5% while maintaining general classification utility. Our findings show that neural model editing can be cast as a reinforcement learning problem, allowing editing policies to be learned from reward feedback rather than manually engineered for each task.