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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50\,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18\%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

作者:

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

BAFIS: Dataset + Framework to assess occupational Bias and Human Preference in modern Text-to-image Models

Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.

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

DYNA : Dynamic Episodic Memory Networks for Augmenting Large Language Models with Temporal Knowledge Graphs in Continuous Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to incorporate new knowledge without forgetting or costly retraining. We propose DYNA, a lightweight framework that augments a frozen LLM with a temporal knowledge graph where events are nodes and temporal relations are directed, timestamped edges. The graph serves as an external, updatable memory. At query time, DYNA retrieves relevant nodes via random walks and centrality measures, then augments the LLM's response. Evaluated on three temporal recall tasks, DYNA reduces catastrophic forgetting by ~7% compared to fine-tuning and improves temporal ordering by ~5% over standard RAG. Higher graph clustering coefficients correlate with better retrieval, showing that graph structure matters. Contributions: (1) episodic memory as temporal KG, (2) retraining-free LLM augmentation, (3) graph properties as predictors of retrieval performance.

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

Proto-LeakNet: Towards Signal-Leak Aware Attribution in Synthetic Human Face Imagery

The growing sophistication of synthetic image and deepfake generation models has turned source attribution and authenticity verification into a critical challenge for modern computer vision systems. Recent studies suggest that diffusion pipelines unintentionally imprint persistent statistical traces, known as signal-leaks, within their outputs, particularly in latent representations. Building on this observation, we propose Proto-LeakNet, a signal-leak-aware and interpretable attribution framework that integrates Closed-set classification with a density-based Open-set evaluation on the learned embeddings, enabling analysis of unseen generators without retraining. Acting in the latent domain of diffusion models, our method re-simulates partial forward diffusion to expose residual generator-specific cues. A temporal attention encoder aggregates multi-step latent features, while a feature-weighted prototype head structures the embedding space and enables transparent attribution. Trained solely on closed data and achieving a Macro AUC of 98.13\%, Proto-LeakNet learns a latent geometry that remains robust under post-processing, surpassing state-of-the-art methods, and achieves strong separability both between real images and known generators, and between known and unseen ones. The codebase is available at the following link: https://github.com/claudiunderthehood/Proto-LeakNet .

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fast and high-fidelity transfer of edge states via dynamical control of topological phases and effects of dissipation

arXiv:2505.16606v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological edge states are robust against symmetry-preserving perturbations and noise, making them promising for quantum information and computation, particularly in topological quantum computation through the braiding operations of Majorana quasiparticles. Realizing these applications requires fast and high-fidelity dynamic control of edge states. In this work, we theoretically propose a high-fidelity protocol for transferring topological edge states by dynamically moving a domain wall between two regions with different topological numbers in one dimension. This protocol fundamentally relies on Lorentz invariance and relativistic effects, because moving the domain wall at a constant speed is described by a mass term with the uniform linear motion in the Dirac equation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in transferring edge states with high fidelity using a one-dimensional quantum walk with two internal states, which is feasible with current experimental technology. We also investigate how bit-flip and dephasing dissipation to the environment affect transfer efficiency. Remarkably, bit (dephasing) dissipation does not affect the fidelity at the slow (fast) transfer limit, which can be explained by the relativistic effects on the edge states.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework

arXiv:2606.17899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Electronic Design Automation (Q-EDA) is emerging as quantum chips move from laboratory prototypes to scalable engineering systems. This paper argues that superconducting quantum chip design is approaching a "SPICE moment" similar to early classical EDA, where growing qubit scale, control complexity, frequency planning, packaging, process variation, and cryogenic measurement feedback require a shift from experience-based design to model-driven engineering. We propose a Quantum Chip Paradigm Framework that treats Q-EDA not only as software, but as part of the quantum chip development paradigm. Unlike classical HDL-first design, quantum chip design must begin with physical structures such as Josephson junctions, resonators, couplers, readout elements, control lines, and packaging environments. The framework emphasizes PCell-based modeling, SPICE-Q simulation, Quantum PDKs, and design-technology-measurement co-optimization. We further outline a hierarchical Q-EDA system spanning physical structures, qubit PCells, logical qubits, quantum arithmetic, functional quantum IP, and Quantum SoC systems. The key goal is to turn physical models, layout rules, simulation results, fabrication data, and measurement feedback into reusable and auditable engineering objects for large-scale quantum processors and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Visual Quality Score Assessment of Large White Goods in Remanufacture with Multi-View Deformable-DETR

Remanufacturing large white goods is essential for a circular economy, yet visual quality assessment remains a manual bottleneck for training and pricing. Conventional detection methods require extensive annotation and struggle with small defects in high-resolution multi-view data. We present a multi-view framework based on Deformable-DETR for automated quality scoring that aggregates information across redundant views to extract fine-grained features. To enhance robustness with limited labels, we employ self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning on expert-annotated scores. Additionally, a linear projection over frozen feature maps identifies regions of interest to explain model decisions. Evaluated on an industrial multi-view dataset, our approach delivers precise quality assessments while reducing reliance on manual annotation and per-part customization, enabling scalable and transparent inspection for remanufacturing lines.

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

Frozen Foundation-Model Embeddings Discard Small-Lesion Signal in Chest Radiography: Implications for Pre-Deployment Evaluation

Frozen vision-transformer (ViT) foundation-model embeddings increasingly serve as the substrate for downstream chest-radiography (CXR) pipelines, yet where small-scale, low-contrast signal is retained or lost in the frozen forward pass has not been systematically quantified across architectures, pretraining domains, and objectives. We probed five frozen ViTs (RAD-DINO, DINOv2-B/14, DINOv3 ViT-7B, BiomedCLIP, MedSigLIP) and a frozen DINO-pretrained ResNet-50 architectural control across three large CXR cohorts (NIH-CXR14, MIMIC-CXR, Emory-CXR; aggregate pool n=492,724) and ChestX-Det10 (n=3,543; 1,462 small-lesion bounding boxes across Calcification, Nodule, Mass). Each model was evaluated with a small-scale-perturbation panel and a region-aware bounding-box-stratified probe on real lesions, comparing three pooling modes from the same forward pass: classification token (CLS), patch-mean (mean over all final-layer patch tokens), and bounding-box-restricted patch-local. On the perturbation panel, CLS embeddings sat at the chance floor (area under the ROC curve [AUC] 0.500-0.524); patch-mean was indistinguishable from CLS on iso-blur and reticular-fine cells but rose with CLS on larger directional-blur footprints, while disease AUC on globally decided tasks ranged 0.642-0.913. Patch-local probes recovered AUC ~1.0 from the same forward pass (per-model mean improvement +0.412 to +0.488); the ResNet-50 control reproduced the chance floor. On ChestX-Det10, image-level CLS classification showed within-class small-versus-large stratum gaps up to +0.243 AUC; bounding-box-level patch-local pooling on the same forward pass recovered AUC >= 0.899 on every (model x class) cell. Frozen ViT embeddings silently suppress small-scale signal at the global-aggregation step; the signal is recoverable from patch tokens conditional on a region of interest.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RECOM: A Validity Discrimination Tradeoff in Automatic Metrics for Open Ended Reddit Question Answering

Automatic metrics are the default for evaluating LLM-generated text, yet a metric is quietly asked to do two jobs: tell genuine content alignment from surface coincidence (validity), and tell a better system from a worse one (discriminative power). On open-ended, opinion-driven question answering, the two are in tension. We introduce RECOM (Reddit Evaluation for Correspondence of Models), a contamination-free evaluation dataset of 15,000 r/AskReddit questions (September 2025), each paired with its authentic community replies, which postdate every evaluated model's training cutoff. Scoring five open-source LLMs (7–10B) against every reply each metric paired with a random-derangement noise floor we find that no metric does both jobs well. Cosine similarity separates real from random answers (Cohen's $d \approx 2$) but cannot rank the five models ($|d| < 0.1$); BERTScore precision appears to rank the models (raw $|d|$ up to 0.63), but once response length is controlled this collapses to $|d| = 0.09$ and its validity is weak ($d \approx 0.8$, versus cosine's $\approx 2$). Because every metric scores the same outputs, this validity–discrimination tradeoff is a property of the metrics, not the models, and we argue it stems from representation design. Three independent LLM judges reproduce the validity gap and likewise separate the five models only weakly. We recommend reporting metrics on both axes, with an explicit random-baseline floor. RECOM is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/recom-D4B0

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606.19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets. We present the first end-to-end framework for safety verification of learned multi-agent communication policies through policy abstraction: neural policies are distilled into interpretable decision trees, then formally verified, with empirical validation confirming that verified safety properties transfer to original networks. Our four-stage pipeline consists of domain-specific feature extraction from agent observations, decision tree distillation achieving 97.9% +/- 1.2% fidelity to neural policies, automated translation to PRISM probabilistic model checker specifications with complete feature-to-state-variable correspondence, and compositional verification of Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL) properties via pairwise decomposition with union-bound aggregation and empirical neighbor modeling. Evaluating Vector-Quantized Variational Information Bottleneck (VQ-VIB) policies for multi-drone coordination with 5-7 agents, we verify 18 temporal logic properties across safety, liveness, and cooperation, achieving 88.9% property satisfaction with all five safety thresholds satisfied (0.3% collision probability vs. 1% threshold). Monte Carlo validation of original neural policies confirms that verified safety properties transfer with

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Neural Network with Squeeze-Excitation-like Attention

arXiv:2606.19853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SEA-PINN, a novel architecture that incorporates a Squeeze-Excitation-like attention mechanism into physics-informed neural networks to dynamically recalibrate the importance of neurons across layers. A key feature of SEA-PINN is its highly stable initialization. On 17 out of 20 benchmark problems, SEA-PINN exhibit nearly negligible variance and significantly reduced initial loss, establishing a quasi-deterministic and favorable starting point for optimization. Notably, without employing Fourier feature embeddings or periodic activation functions, SEA-PINN attained competitive accuracy (83\% vs. 90\% improvement relative to FNN-PINN on the high-frequency case 7) as compared with TSA-PINN-a model specifically engineered for high-frequency problems via learnable frequencies in sinusoidal activations. Furthermore, integrating SEA-PINN into TSA-PINN boosted performance by 42.49\%. These results underscore SEA-PINN as a lightweight plug-in module that enhances nonlinear representation power, promotes more robust and efficient convergence, and strengthens the overall reliability of physics-informed learning.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.

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

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

作者:

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

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

Token Factory: Efficiently Integrating Diverse Signals into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.

20.
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.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Impact of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain: a representative interrupted time-series study 2022-2026

Objective: To examine changes in vaping and smoking trends following the announcement and implementation of the disposable vape ban in Great Britain. Design: Interrupted time-series analysis of representative monthly cross-sectional data from the Smoking Toolkit Study. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 118,946 adults ([&ge;]16y), including 12,042 young adults (16-24y), surveyed between Jan-2022 and Feb-2026. Main outcome measures: Changes in trends in disposable vape use among vapers, and current vaping and smoking prevalence, using seasonally-adjusted generalised additive models with comparisons against a no-ban counterfactual in which pre-announcement trends continued unchanged. Results: The proportion of vapers mainly using disposable devices began to decline following the announcement of the ban in Jan-2024, with the fall accelerating after implementation in June-2025. By Feb-2026, 5.6% (95%CI 4.6-6.9) of adult vapers and 7.1% (5.1-10.1) of young adult vapers mainly used disposables, compared with 62.0% (53.6-71.8) and 63.6% (52.7-76.7), respectively, under a no-ban counterfactual. Increases in vaping prevalence slowed post-announcement and plateaued post-implementation; by Feb-2026, prevalence was lower than the no-ban counterfactual in adults (13.6% v 18.8%; difference -5.2 percentage points, 95%CI -7.1 to -3.3) and young adults (27.8% v 39.1%; -11.3, -18.6 to -4.1). Declines in smoking prevalence stalled among adults and reversed among young adults post-announcement, before shifting downward again post-implementation; by Feb-2026, smoking prevalence was similar to the no-ban counterfactual in adults (difference +0.9 percentage points, -0.5 to +2.2) but possibly higher in young adults (+3.3, -0.5 to +7.1). Conclusions: The disposable vape ban in Great Britain was associated with substantial changes after both announcement and implementation, including a marked reduction in disposable vape use and a slowing then plateauing of growth in overall vaping prevalence. However, declines in smoking also temporarily slowed–and among young adults, reversed–after the announcement, before downward trends resumed after implementation.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation (TAS) in untrimmed videos requires dense temporal supervision. However, most of the annotation cost is spent identifying action transitions where segmentation errors concentrate and small temporal shifts can disproportionately degrade segment-level metrics. We introduce B-ACT, a clip-budgeted active learning framework that explicitly allocates supervision to these error-prone boundary regions. B-ACT operates in a hierarchical two-stage loop: (i) it ranks and queries unlabeled videos using predictive uncertainty, and (ii) within each selected video, it detects candidate transitions from the current model predictions and selects the top-$K$ boundaries via a novel boundary score. The boundary score fuses neighborhood uncertainty, class ambiguity, and temporal prediction dynamics to reveal the underlying importance of each frame. Importantly, our annotation protocol requests labels only at the boundary frames while still training on boundary-centered clips to exploit temporal context through the model's receptive field. Extensive experiments on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast demonstrate that boundary-centric supervision delivers strong label efficiency and consistently surpasses representative TAS active learning baselines and prior state of the art under sparse budgets. Gains are largest on datasets where performance is highly sensitive to boundary placement, as measured by edit and overlap-based F1 metrics.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Q-DICE: Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator

arXiv:2606.11340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As distributed quantum computing (DQC) offers a leading path towards scalable quantum computation, the ability to benchmark distributed algorithms under realistic conditions becomes critical for system co-design. However, without access to physical systems, researchers lack tools to evaluate distribution protocols. We introduce Q-DICE (Quantum Distributed Interconnect Compiler and Emulator), a hardware-aware emulation environment for benchmarking distributed quantum circuits on classical simulators and on NISQ-era monolithic hardware. This work provides three core contributions: (1) a programmatic scheme to construct distributed QPU backends, utilizing two novel techniques - QPU slicing and stitching - to facilitate distributed circuit mapping, (2) a methodology for modeling nonlocal link noise using physically motivated Kraus operators and stochastic error channels, and (3) a boundary-aware circuit mapping algorithm enforcing distributed QPU topology constraints during transpilation. Together, these components constitute a distribution-aware compiler and noise-modeling engine that faithfully enforces the physical limitations of distributed quantum hardware within existing execution environments. We validate Q-DICE against a multitude of experimentally demonstrated quantum circuits, including a distributed Grover's search on optically linked trapped-ion hardware, achieving a worst-case fidelity deviation of 4% between simulated and experimental results. These findings demonstrate Q-DICE's capacity to accurately reproduce real distributed quantum system behavior across platforms, streamlining experimentation with distributed quantum algorithms and architectures.

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

Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network for High-Dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii Equations on Unbounded Domains

arXiv:2604.09361v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces the Stochastic-Dimension Frozen Sampled Neural Network (SD-FSNN), a novel computational framework for solving high-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE) on unbounded domain. The proposed method circumvents the curse-of-dimensionality that plagues traditional discretizations and the computational bottlenecks of gradient-based neural network solvers through a synergistic combination of techniques. First, a prescribed Gaussian envelope encodes the far-field decay of the wavefunction, enabling a space-time separation where the spatial approximation is handled by a frozen, single-hidden-layer neural network with data-driven sampled features. This yields a gradient-free formalism where spatial derivatives are analytically precomputed and time-dependence is evolved via reduced ODEs. Second, a stochastic-dimension sampler provides a conditionally unbiased estimate of the spatial operator by evaluating only a small subset of spatial dimensions at each time step, essentially reducing computational and memory costs. Discrete conservation laws are also enforced, ensuring long-term stability. Extensive numerical experiments on GPE in up to 1000 dimensions demonstrate that SD-FSNN achieves significantly higher accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, including PINNs, randomized feature methods, and tensor-network approaches. The results confirm that SD-FSNN effectively mitigates the Kolmogorov $n$-width barrier for frozen-basis models on structured solution manifolds.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.