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

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

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

Uncertainty Quality of VGGT: An Analysis on the DTU Benchmark Dataset

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has already attracted a great deal of attention in a short period of time, not least due to the Best Paper Award at CVPR-2025. Similar to DUSt3R and MASt3R, VGGT aims to bring about a paradigm shift by replacing established methods like bundle adjustment and feature matching with a simple, unified, feed-forward neural network that predicts camera poses, depth maps, and dense 3D structure directly from multiple images of a scene in a few seconds. A key aspect is its ability to process an arbitrary number of views consistently in a single forward pass without any post-processing or iterative optimization. For photogrammetry, this opens new possibilities for real-time, scalable, and accessible 3D reconstruction. In this context, not only high reconstruction accuracy but also high-quality uncertainty estimates are crucial, as they foster trust and enable robust quality assurance. This paper therefore investigates the quality of VGGT's uncertainty predictions. The analysis identifies an effective confidence threshold for filtering VGGT's raw output and demonstrates that enhancing uncertainty quality holds strong potential for improving the accuracy of its 3D reconstructions.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

M4-SAR: A Multi-Resolution, Multi-Polarization, Multi-Scene, Multi-Source Dataset and Benchmark for optical-SAR Object Detection

Single-source remote sensing object detection using optical or SAR images struggles in complex environments. Optical images offer rich textural details but are often affected by low-light, cloud-obscured, or low-resolution conditions, reducing the detection performance. SAR images are robust to weather, but suffer from speckle noise and limited semantic expressiveness. Optical and SAR images provide complementary advantages, and fusing them can significantly improve the detection accuracy. However, progress in this field is hindered by the lack of large-scale, standardized datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a new comprehensive dataset for optical-SAR fusion object detection, named Multi-resolution, Multi-polarization, Multi-scene, Multi-source SAR dataset (M4-SAR). It contains 112,174 instance-level aligned image pairs and nearly one million labeled instances with arbitrary orientations, spanning six key categories. To enable standardized evaluation, we develop a unified benchmarking toolkit that integrates six state-of-the-art multi-source fusion methods. Additionally, we propose E2E-OSDet, a novel end-to-end multi-source fusion detection framework that mitigates cross-domain discrepancies and establishes a robust baseline for future studies. Extensive experiments on M4-SAR demonstrate that fusing optical and SAR data can improve mAP by 5.7\% over single-source inputs, with particularly significant gains in complex environments. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/wchao0601/M4-SAR.

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

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Prediction-Powered Risk Monitoring of Deployed Models for Detecting Harmful Distribution Shifts

arXiv:2602.02229v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of monitoring model performance in dynamic environments where labeled data are limited. To this end, we propose prediction-powered risk monitoring (PPRM), a semi-supervised risk-monitoring approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI). PPRM constructs anytime-valid lower bounds on the running risk by combining synthetic labels with a small set of true labels. Harmful shifts are detected via a threshold-based comparison with an upper bound on the nominal risk, satisfying assumption-free finite-sample guarantees on the type-I error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PPRM through extensive experiments on image classification, large language model (LLM), and telecommunications monitoring tasks.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

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

Source-Grounded Data Generation for Text-to-JSON Learning

From financial filings to clinical records, legacy industries rely heavily on long, unstructured documents to store high-value information. Reliably extracting this information into structured, machine-readable representations is a key prerequisite to making the contents accessible to automated systems. JSON is a natural target for such structured extraction, yet constructing reliable and scalable text-to-JSON training data remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose STAGE (Spreadsheet-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEneration), a source-grounded data generation pipeline that constructs reports and JSON schema by using LLMs for scalable synthesis while validating ground-truth values against the underlying spreadsheet. Evaluations on STAGE-Eval, our source-grounded benchmark with an 851-example test set, show that STAGE produces stronger training data than existing approaches. This improves Qwen3-4B exact match from 31.37% to 74.27% and value accuracy from 45.46% to 90.69%.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Effect of Lowering the Drink-Driving Blood Alcohol Limit in Scotland on Road Traffic Crashes: a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Study

Objective: To evaluate the road safety impact arising from Scotlands 2014 reduction in the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit for drivers, and to assess whether the effect of the reform varied across different spatial contexts. Design: A quasi-experimental statistical longitudinal study using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) approach. Setting: Small-area panel data for Great Britain, with areas (Middle-layer Super Output Areas, MSOAs, in England and Wales and Intermediate Zones, IZs, in Scotland) classed into control and treatment groups according to whether they were exposed to Scotlands BAC reform. The control and treatment groups comprise 7088 spatial units in England and Wales and 852 spatial units in Scotland, respectively, observed over the period 2008-2019. Participants: The study primarily analyses police-reported road traffic collision data from the UK Department for Transports STATS19 system. Data were analysed at the MSOA/IZ level. This is a secondary dataset, and we therefore did not involve patients or the public in formulating the research question, determining outcome measures, or designing and conducting the study. Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome measures were log-transformed rates of total road traffic crashes, and (weekend) night-time crashes (22:00-04:00) per 100,000 population. The latter is used as a proxy measure for drunk driving. Results: Our results indicate that the reduction in the legal BAC limit led to statistically significant declines in road traffic crash rates. Aggregate estimates suggest reductions of 12.0% (95% confidence interval (CI): [-13.7%, -10.3%]) in total crashes, 15.6% (95% CI: [-20.7%, -10.2%]) in night-time crashes, and 12.4% (95% CI: [-16.7%, -7.9%]) in weekend night-time crashes. We also find substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects across spatial contexts. Effects were strongest in rural and less densely populated areas, where reductions exceeded 16% (95% CI: [-18.7%, -13.9%]) for total crashes and reached up to 29.6% (95% CI: [-35.8%, -22.8%]) for night-time and 21.4% (95% CI: [-28.3%, -13.9%]) for weekend night-time crashes. Moderate but statistically significant effects were also observed in dense urban areas, whereas effects in suburban and transitional areas were smaller and not statistically significant. Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that lowering the legal BAC limit in Scotland led to meaningful reductions in road traffic crashes, particularly during higher-risk periods and in rural areas. The findings further suggest that the effectiveness of BAC regulation may vary across local contexts, highlighting the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity when evaluating road safety policies.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Combining Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation with LLMs for Reading Content Recommendations

arXiv:2606.14817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for generating personalized reading content using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The proposed architecture consists of four modules: Input, RAG, Generation, and Judging and enables users to specify both a question and a target reading content complexity. RAG is employed to retrieve relevant information from the Internet, enriching and grounding the content produced by three modern LLMs: Meta LLaMA 4 Scout, LLaMA 3.1 8B Instant, and Google Gemma2 9B. Reading materials are generated using three prompting strategies (Chain-of-Thought, zero-shot, and few-shot), and the LLM-as-a-Judge module automatically evaluates answer quality and alignment with the desired readability level. Experimental results show that RAG consistently improves system performance across all models and prompting techniques, increasing relevance and particularly groundedness by up to 26-35 percentage points. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the RAG-augmented architecture effectively produces reading content tailored to user queries and desired textual complexity.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present \texttt{AfriqueLLM}, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models and code have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm) and [Github](https://github.com/McGill-NLP/AfriqueLLM).

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Sociodemographic and health correlates of reimbursement authorizations for cannabis for medical purposes in Canadian veterans: A cross-sectional study linking the Life After Services Studies 2019 and Health Administrative Databases

Background Evidence on factors associated with cannabis for medical purposes (CMP) authorizations among Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) clients remains limited and inconsistent, particularly concerning mental health and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a leading indication for use. We investigated demographic, clinical and service characteristics associated with VAC authorizations for CMP reimbursement. Method We linked VAC administrative CMP program data with responses from the 2019 Life After Services Studies cross-sectional survey of Regular Force veterans released between 1998 and 2018. Multivariable logistic regressions examined associations between CMP reimbursement (yes/no) and demographic, clinical and well-being factors, with analyses stratified by PTSD status. Results Among 1,289 respondents (weighted n=33,131), 18.4% were authorized for CMP reimbursement. Younger age (

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Optical cooling by interfacial charge transfer in 2D heterostructures

作者:

Optical refrigeration, or laser cooling of solids1, offers a cryogen-free route to temperature control for quantum and electronic systems. Existing progress2–8 relies on a phonon-assisted up-conversion photoluminescence approach, which remains constrained by stringent material and excitation requirements. Here we demonstrate a distinct route, interfacial-charge-transfer-driven optical cooling, in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. Photo-excited carriers in WSe2 cross a type-II junction into MoSe2 or WS2, extracting lattice energy nonradiatively—through a phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer process. Raman and photoluminescence measurements show prominent low-temperature signatures in the WSe2 layer, with transient absorption spectroscopy identifying a phonon-assisted, barrier-activated interlayer charge transfer. Molecular dynamics simulations show a prominent interfacial thermal resistance sustaining the temperature gradient. This barrier-mediated phonon extraction bypasses the need for near-unity quantum efficiency or resonant excitation, offering a promising strategy for cryogen-free refrigeration and thermal management in quantum, optoelectronic and nanoscale systems. Optical cooling in two-dimensional semiconductor heterostructures is demonstrated through phonon-assisted interfacial charge transfer, enabling cryogen-free thermal management without stringent quantum-efficiency requirements.

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

Counterfactual Optimization of Baseball Pitch Sequences and Estimation of Its Impact on Season-Level Statistics

arXiv:2606.17345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although pitch sequencing is a central topic in baseball analytics, previous studies have primarily focused on optimizing the final pitch within a single plate appearance, leaving the role of preceding setup pitches and their impact on long-term season-level performance insufficiently examined. To address these issues, this study conducted counterfactual analyses using MLB Statcast data. A Transformer-based machine-learning model was trained to predict whether a target pitch would result in an in-play outcome or swing-out. Counterfactual pitch sequences were then generated by replacing either the final pitch or the preceding setup pitch with alternative pitch types and locations while keeping the surrounding contextual information fixed. Optimal counterfactual selections were defined as those that minimized the predicted in-play probability, and their expected effects on pitchers' seasonal statistics were estimated using regression models linking model outputs to season statistics. The results suggest that the optimization of both final and setup pitches may substantially influence season-level performance, including improvements of more than 1.0 in K/9. The analyses also provided several practical insights, including velocity-band-specific effective locations, the importance of pitch commands, and the expansion of pitch-selection options through middle-velocity pitches. These findings quantitatively support the strategic importance of pitch sequencing in baseball.

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

Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging: Transitioning from Uniform Priors to Sparse Posteriors in Ensemble Learning

arXiv:2606.13589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Simplex-Constrained Sparse Bagging (SCSB), a mathematically rigorous framework for post-training compression and probability calibration of bootstrap-based bagging ensembles. Standard bagging ensembles (such as Random Forests, Bagged SVMs, and Bagged Neural Networks) assign uniform voting power to all constituent estimators. However, this naive uniform prior ignores the varying local competence of base estimators and contributes to model overconfidence. We formulate ensemble pruning and calibration as a joint optimization problem over the probability simplex by minimizing the Out-Of-Bag (OOB) loss. To induce sparsity, we address the theoretical "L1-simplex paradox" – the mathematical reality that the L1 norm is constant on the simplex and fails to prune – by introducing a concave quadratic penalty. SCSB is model-agnostic and achieves up to 96% ensemble compression, yielding linear inference speedups and superior probability calibration (lowered Expected Calibration Error) while preserving or enhancing generalization accuracy.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

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

Polarization-Resolved Photon Statistics of Cavity Quantum Materials

arXiv:2606.11550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: By forming hybrid light-matter states, optical cavities offer a route for engineering material properties, however, unambiguously probing the effects of light-matter coupling remains difficult. Here, we show that the polarization-resolved statistics of photons transmitted through a cavity, measurable via $g^{(2)}$, provide one such diagnostic. By relating $g^{(2)}$ to matter correlation functions such as the Raman structure factor, we link photon bunching and antibunching to material properties. By applying this method to the stripy-to-antiferromagnetic transition in the Kitaev-Heisenberg spin model, we find that polarization-dependent patterns of bunching and antibunching encode the magnetic point-group symmetries of each phase and characterize the behavior at the phase boundary. Finally, we predict measuring $g^{(2)}$ for output photon pairs polarized orthogonal to the input field will isolate higher-order light-matter scattering processes that probe higher-order material correlations.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Accountability Paradox: How Platform API Restrictions Undermine AI Transparency Mandates

arXiv:2505.11577v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent application programming interface (API) restrictions on major social media platforms challenge compliance with the EU Digital Services Act [20], which mandates data access for algorithmic transparency. We develop a structured audit framework to assess the growing misalignment between regulatory requirements and platform implementations. Our comparative analysis of X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and Meta identifies critical ``audit blind-spots'' where platform content moderation and algorithmic amplification remain inaccessible to independent verification. Our findings reveal an ``accountability paradox'': as platforms increasingly rely on AI systems, they simultaneously restrict the capacity for independent oversight. We propose targeted policy interventions aligned with the AI Risk Management Framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology [80], emphasizing federated access models and enhanced regulatory enforcement.

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

CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in association accuracy and identification precision scores with a lower number of identity switches.

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

Fair Online Resource Allocation

arXiv:2606.18679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of fair online resource allocation, motivated by applications such as refugee resettlement and airline scheduling, where agents arrive sequentially and must be assigned to facilities with limited capacities. We introduce a model that maximizes the overall welfare subject to resource constraints and a Lipschitz fairness requirement, which ensures that similar agents arriving in the same batch receive similar expected outcomes. We first analyze the offline problem, proving that the value of the optimal fair allocation is at least an $\Omega(1/\gamma)$ fraction of the optimal unfair allocation, where $\gamma$ is the fairness coefficient, thereby bounding the price of fairness. For the online setting, we propose an algorithm based on dual mirror descent that enforces fairness constraints within batches while estimating optimal dual variables. We prove that this algorithm achieves sublinear regret relative to the optimal offline fluid benchmark. Finally, we validate our theoretical results using real-world data from the Refugee Economies Programme, demonstrating the algorithm's performance and examining the trade-offs between welfare maximization and fairness enforcement.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MirrorCheck: Efficient Adversarial Defense for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly susceptible to sophisticated adversarial attacks, including adaptive strategies specifically designed to bypass existing defenses. To address this vulnerability, we propose MirrorCheck, a robust and model-agnostic detection framework that operates effectively in both unimodal and multimodal settings. MirrorCheck leverages Text-to-Image (T2I) models to regenerate visual content from captions produced by the target model and assesses semantic consistency by comparing feature-space embeddings between the original and synthesized images. To enhance robustness against adaptive attacks, MirrorCheck introduces a stochastic defense strategy that randomly selects T2I generators and image encoders from a diverse model zoo. Additionally, we incorporate a novel One-Time-Use (OTU) perturbation applied to the selected encoder embeddings, regulated by a scaling factor, which decreases the effectiveness of adaptive attacks. Extensive experiments across multiple threat scenarios demonstrate that MirrorCheck consistently outperforms baseline methods, and maintains its utility even under strong adaptive adversarial conditions.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Composing Linear Layers from Irreducibles

arXiv:2507.11688v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors – geometric objects encoding oriented planes – and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models.