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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

EvidenceLens: A Claim-Evidence Matrix for Auditing Financial Question Answering

Large language models are increasingly used to answer questions over annual reports, earnings decks, and analyst notes, yet their outputs remain difficult to verify in high-stakes financial workflows. A fluent answer can blend directly grounded statements, weak synthesis, and unsupported claims across narrative text, tables, and charts. We present EvidenceLens, a visual analytics prototype that treats financial question answering as a claim-evidence alignment problem. The system decomposes an answer into atomic claims, summarizes support composition and confidence, support gaps, and coordinates claim-level inspection with source passages, table cells, and chart regions. Its core visual representation is a multimodal claim-evidence matrix that makes coverage, contradiction, and modality imbalance immediately visible. To support reproducibility, we also specify a JSON-based artifact schema, a lightweight multimodal alignment pipeline, and a deterministic review-priority ranking that maps backend signals into an auditable visual structure. Through representative report-auditing scenarios, we show how EvidenceLens helps analysts distinguish grounded claims from overconfident synthesis that conventional chat interfaces flatten.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Korzhinskii-Net: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Sub-Surface Mineral Prospectivity Modelling

作者:

arXiv:2606.13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) underpins exploration economics, yet most operational pipelines reduce to data-driven classifiers trained on shallow surface proxies. Such models are blind to the subsurface physics that actually localises ore: heat advection, fluid flow, and lithology-dependent precipitation. We present Korzhinskii-Net, a 2-D radial physics-informed neural network (PINN) that couples Darcy flow, advective-diffusive heat transport, and a softplus-saturated reaction rate into a single differentiable forward model, weakly supervised by surface and remote-sensing proxies. The network is named after Dmitri S. Korzhinskii (1899-1985), whose theory of infiltration metasomatism provides the physical scaffold. We evaluate Korzhinskii-Net on five ore provinces spanning four commodity classes – Norilsk (Ni-Cu-PGE), Pechenga (Ni-Cu sulphide), Udokan (sandstone-hosted Cu), Sukhoi Log (orogenic Au), and Mirny (kimberlitic diamond) – under a fair, leakage-controlled 5-fold cross-validation protocol with hard ring-shaped negatives. Korzhinskii-Net attains a mean PR-AUC of 0.885 versus 0.281 for the strongest classical baseline (gradient boosting), and a mean fractional rank of 0.019 versus 0.413. The improvement is consistent across all five provinces and four commodity systems, suggesting that physics-informed differentiable simulators, even when constrained only by global open-data proxies, can recover localisation patterns that pure feature-based learners systematically miss. We release the full pipeline and evaluation harness as open source.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Construction of ergodic IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$

arXiv:2506.10476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove the existence of infinite-volume IDLA forests in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ , with $d \geq 2$, based on a multi-source IDLA protocol. Unlike IDLA aggregates, the laws of the IDLA forests studied here depend on the trajectories of particles, and then do not satisfy the famous Abelian property. Their existence is due to a stabilization result (Theorem 1.1, our main result) that we establish using percolation tools. Although the sources are infinitely many, we also prove that each of them play the same role in the building procedure, which results in an ergodicity property for the IDLA forests (Theorem 1.2).

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A Leakage-Aware Comparative Benchmark of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Transformer Models for Reliable Leukemia Detection

Automated classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images has often reported near-perfect performance on the C-NMC 2019 dataset. We show that such results can be inflated by patient-level data leakage caused by random image-level partitioning, where cells from the same subject may appear in both training and test folds. We establish a leakage-aware benchmark under a strict subject-disjoint protocol, comparing LightGBM, RBF-SVM, EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, and ViT-Tiny. Models are developed using three subject-disjoint folds from 73 subjects and evaluated on an external preliminary-phase test set of 1,867 images from 28 unseen subjects with zero patient overlap. Beyond discrimination, we assess calibration using expected calibration error, Brier score, and temperature scaling. Under honest evaluation, EfficientNet-B1 achieves the best performance, with AUROC 0.913, sensitivity 0.87, specificity 0.80, and calibrated ECE 0.024. Frozen-feature classifiers and ViT-Tiny show high sensitivity but poor specificity, indicating a tendency to over-predict the malignant class. A random-versus-subject-disjoint ablation shows that random splitting inflates AUROC by about 0.04 even in the conservative frozen-feature setting. These findings caution against image-level evaluation on C-NMC 2019 and provide a reproducible, calibration-aware benchmark for future work.

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

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Understanding and Usefulness of Effect Size and Certainty of Evidence: A Cross-sectional Survey of Evidence-Based Practice Competencies Among Registered Dietitians

Introduction: Understanding of absolute and relative estimates (i.e., effect size), and certainty of evidence corresponding to those estimates, is a fundamental evidence-based practice competency to promote informed clinical decision-making. While research has been conducted in the medical profession, there is no published research on these competencies in the nutrition and dietetics profession. Methods: Among registered dietitians, our main objectives were to assess (1) their understanding and perceived usefulness of three absolute and two relative estimate approaches to assess effect size, (2) their perceived usefulness of certainty of evidence, and (3) factors influencing their understanding and perceived usefulness. We conducted a web-based, cross-sectional survey among dietitians recruited from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (United States). Participants received effect estimates based on hypothetical dietary interventions vs. usual diet for reducing myocardial infarction risk. Results: Of the 11,050 dietitians who received the survey link, 210 participated (2.0% response rate), and only completers (n=114) were included in the analysis. Participants demonstrated a similar understanding of the relative (27.6%) and absolute (27.5%) estimates, with Risk Difference (30.7% correct responses) being the best understood approach and Number Needed to Treat (24.6%) being the least. The understanding of five approaches was not different than random guessing (p>0.05). While perceived usefulness scores were similar between five approaches, they were highest when data was presented as Relative Risk [mean (SD): 4.82 (1.50)]. Dietitians rated the usefulness of certainty of evidence favorably [mean (SD): 5.07 (1.83), on a 7-point scale), and no factors were associated with correct understanding. Conclusion: Dietitians may have limited understanding of how to interpret effect sizes, a finding consistent with surveys of other health professionals. To optimize informed decision-making between dietitians and clients, dietetic programs and continuing education platforms should consider additional training on interpreting effect sizes and certainty of evidence for effect sizes.

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

Learning-Augmented Approximation for Unrelated-Machines Makespan Scheduling

arXiv:2606.13133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, Antoniadis et al. (ICLR 2025) proposed a framework for incorporating predictions to approximate NP-hard selection problems. Despite its simplicity, this approach tightly matches theoretical lower bounds, making its generalization highly compelling. We address an open question raised in the work of Antoniadis et al., concerning the extension of this approach to other important problems outside the class of selection problems, such as scheduling. We develop a learning-augmented algorithm for the makespan minimization problem on unrelated machines, denoted by $R\|C_{\max}$. By using predictions of heavy job assignments, we achieve a polynomial-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation for accurate predictions that smoothly degrades to a worst-case 2-approximation as the error increases. We conclude our work with an empirical analysis of our method.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Geodesic Calculus on Implicitly Defined Latent Manifolds

arXiv:2510.09468v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent manifolds of autoencoders provide low-dimensional representations of data, which can be studied from a geometric perspective. We propose to describe these latent manifolds as implicit submanifolds of some ambient latent space. Based on this, we develop tools for a discrete Riemannian calculus approximating classical geometric operators. These tools are robust against inaccuracies of the implicit representation often occurring in practical examples. To obtain a suitable implicit representation, we propose to learn an approximate projection onto the latent manifold by minimizing a denoising objective. This approach is independent of the underlying autoencoder and supports the use of different Riemannian geometries on the latent manifolds. The framework in particular enables the computation of geodesic paths connecting given end points and shooting geodesics via the Riemannian exponential maps on latent manifolds. We evaluate our approach on various autoencoders trained on synthetic and real data.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

A random approach to the multibonacci sequence

arXiv:2606.14294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a random approach to the multibonacci sequence. We generalise the model introduced by Benjamin, Levin, Mahlburg, and Quinn, which is based on a random tiling method using dominoes and squares that leads to the Fibonacci sequence, and which was extended to the tribonacci case in a previous work by the authors. Our approach employs tiling with linear $k$-ominoes, $k=1,\ldots,s$, combined with specific colouring, to generate a weighted multibonacci sequence. For a natural random variable~$X$ defined by this model, we establish the distribution of $X$ in terms of multibonacci numbers and compute $\mathbb{E}[X] = 2^{s+1}-3$.

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

Risk Under Pressure: Compute-Aware Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness in Language Models

arXiv:2606.11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly. In practice, the computational expense of different attack strategies can vary by orders of magnitude. Consequently, ASR at a fixed budget can obscure the true effort required to jailbreak a model, thereby making it hard to determine whether an attack's cost justifies its payoff to the attacker. We propose a compute-aware evaluation framework based on computational pressure, measured in cumulative floating-point operations (FLOPs), as a proxy for adversarial effort. We introduce risk-compute curves, which map compute budgets to attack risk, and derive two metrics that summarize the average pressure required for a given attack to succeed. Across ten models spanning three families and four different stages in language model training and alignment, evaluated with three attack strategies (gradient-based, iterative refinement, and template-based) on two jailbreak robustness benchmarks, we find: (1) alignment training has non-monotonic effects on compute-space robustness; (2) scaling model size reduces gradient-based attack effectiveness but has limited impact on cheaper template-based attacks; (3) gradient-based attacks optimized on a surrogate model can transfer to a separate target model, providing a way to reduce attacker costs; (4) compute cost varies by up to ${\approx}5{\times}$ across harm categories within a single model; and (5) safety-aligned RL increases aggregate cost while leaving some categories disproportionately accessible. We release our framework to enable compute-aware risk assessment and evaluation.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Universal Gates with Pauli Strings and Beyond

arXiv:2606.12096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Any quantum computation consists of a sequence of unitary evolutions described by a finite set of Hamiltonians. For the case where this set consists of only products of Pauli operators, known as Pauli strings, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for it to generate $\mathfrak{su}(2^n)$, i.e., to be universal for quantum computation on $n$ qubits. When combining Pauli strings with a general Hamiltonian, we show a sufficient (and in certain circumstances even necessary) condition for universality based on the Pauli-basis expansion of the Hamiltonian. As an application of these results, we prove two corollaries: (i) a necessary and sufficient condition for the universality of a general Hamiltonian given arbitrary single-qubit control on all qubits, and (ii) the universality of an XYZ Heisenberg Hamiltonian with local control of just two adjacent qubits.

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

Confidence-Aware Automated Assessment of Student-Drawn Scientific Models

arXiv:2606.20264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Student-generated drawings are widely used in science education to assess learners' conceptual understanding in modeling-based tasks aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). However, scoring such drawings requires expert human judgment to interpret complex visual representations, making large-scale assessment costly to implement and sustain in classroom settings. In this work, we study automated scoring of student-generated scientific drawings using a vision-based model. We evaluate a Vision Transformer (ViT) with parameter-efficient adaptation and propose a confidence-aware scoring framework that derives response-level confidence from test-time predictive distributions. This confidence signal enables selective automation by scoring high-confidence responses automatically while deferring uncertain cases for human review. Experiments on six NGSS-aligned middle school assessment items show that the proposed approach improves scoring reliability while supporting a practical trade-off between automated coverage and scoring risk, highlighting the value of confidence-aware methods for trustworthy educational assessment.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Where Computation Lives Inside TabPFN: Causal Localisation of Attention Head Function

arXiv:2606.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first causal mechanistic analysis of a tabular foundation model, investigating how TabPFN 2.5's feature wise attention heads distribute computation across layers. Using activation patching, ablation, and attention entropy across two synthetic regression datasets, we find clear temporal specialisation: one head's causal necessity dominates that of the others by 2 to 5 times at peak layer, with its dominant layer shifting across tasks of different complexity, while the remaining heads exhibit symmetric late layer profiles. Attention entropy and patching provide convergent evidence for the computationally active layers of the dominant head. We additionally investigate inference time steerability via contrastive activation steering, which fails to transfer across samples. We attribute this result to TabPFN's in context learning mechanism, which encodes task structure through context dependent attention rather than the stable parametric directions that make steering tractable in language models.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

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

Region-Adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the leading choice for generative tasks across diverse domains. However, their reliance on multiple sequential forward passes significantly limits real-time performance. Previous acceleration methods have primarily focused on reducing the number of sampling steps or reusing intermediate results, failing to leverage variations across spatial regions within the image due to the constraints of convolutional U-Net structures. By harnessing the flexibility of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) in handling variable number of tokens, we introduce RAS, a novel, training-free sampling strategy that dynamically assigns different sampling ratios to regions within an image based on the focus of the DiT model. Our key observation is that during each sampling step, the model concentrates on semantically meaningful regions, and these areas of focus exhibit strong continuity across consecutive steps. Leveraging this insight, RAS updates only the regions currently in focus, while other regions are updated using cached noise from the previous step. The model's focus is determined based on the output from the preceding step, capitalizing on the temporal consistency we observed. We evaluate RAS on Stable Diffusion 3 and Lumina-Next-T2I, achieving speedups up to 2.36x and 2.51x, respectively, with minimal degradation in generation quality. Additionally, a user study reveals that RAS delivers comparable qualities under human evaluation while achieving a 1.6x speedup. Our approach makes a significant step towards more efficient diffusion transformers, enhancing their potential for real-time applications.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch: Switchable low-power and low-noise generation of magnetic fields using permanent magnets

arXiv:2605.05158v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Across many areas of science, there is a need to generate magnetic fields that are both ultra-stable and switchable on and off. Current-carrying wire configurations are switchable but are susceptible to current noise. Existing current-controlled approaches to switching the field produced by a permanent magnet involve altering the magnets magnetisation, which typically requires large field pulses and produces excessive power dissipation in high frequency applications. We present a hybrid technique to switch the field of any arbitrary magnet through use of a non-linear ferromagnetic circuit, named the Saturable Electronic Reluctance Switch (SERS). The circuit achieves a linear and monotonic ramp of the magnetic field up to a current threshold, above which the field becomes constant. Crucially, the applied current has minimal influence on the magnetic field stability and demagnetisation of the magnet is avoided. The power dissipated in each switching cycle is expected to be many orders of magnitude less than for existing permanent magnet switching approaches. SERS is also robust to fabrication errors, suppressing noise in the control current by several orders of magnitude in a non-ideal device. To illustrate its application, a SERS-driven device is proposed for generating ultra-stable magnetic field gradients in a scalable trapped-ion quantum computer. We find this device offers an order of magnitude reduction in power dissipation compared to state-of-the-art current carrying wires, while reducing magnetic field noise originating from current fluctuations by up to five orders of magnitude.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Gaussian superpositions for bosonic encodings

arXiv:2603.15258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-Gaussian bosonic states are ubiquitous in interacting light–matter systems, many-body platforms, and relativistic quantum field settings, but their quantitative characterization is hindered by the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and by the poor scalability of Fock-space truncation methods. We introduce an exact finite-manifold encoding for states supported on a finite span of Gaussian branches, enabling the use of standard finite-dimensional quantum-information tools directly on an effective density matrix whose entries are determined by Gaussian overlaps. As demonstrations, we obtain closed-form and numerically stable evaluations of entropies and relative-entropy non-Gaussianity, and derive an analytic expression for the bipartite entanglement negativity of arbitrary multimode two-branch Gaussian superpositions, including a minimal which-branch dephasing model. Our framework provides a practical bridge between experimentally accessible continuous-variable resources (e.g., cat-like and measurement-conditioned states) and discrete-variable information measures, with immediate applications to benchmarking non-Gaussian resources in several quantum technology platforms.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Redirecting the Flow: Image Customization through Attention Distribution Shift

Subject-driven image customization aims to generate images that not only follow textual instructions but also preserve the identity of a given reference subject. Existing approaches, including test-time fine-tuning, encoder-based methods, and token competition in shared attention spaces, suffer from limited efficiency, misalignment between extracted reference features and the generative process, and interference from irrelevant information. To address these limitations, we formulate the customization task as a distribution shift induced by incorporating reference images into text-to-image generation, and derive a Conditional Attention Distribution Shift formulation grounded in maximum entropy theory. Building on this formulation, we propose CustomShift, a dual-branch architecture based on Stable Diffusion 3. The Reference-Alignment Branch leverages self-attention between reference images and subject names to achieve layer-wise alignment with latent representations, while the Cross-Guidance Branch integrates textual and reference cues to guide generation. Experiments on the DreamBooth and Custom101 benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a better balance between semantic fidelity and subject consistency.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

A P\={a}ninian Foundation for Indic Language Processing

More than a billion people communicate in Indic languages, yet the natural language processing infrastructure serving them remains fragmented and underdeveloped. The cause is structural: the field organizes its tools and benchmarks around individual languages or small subsets of genealogical language families, building separate analyzers, parsers, and datasets for each language and starting over for the next. This overlooks a deep regularity. Through more than two millennia of convergence around Sanskrit, Indic languages came to share a morphosyntactic architecture formalized in P\={a}nini's grammar, the Ast\={a}dhy\={a}y\={i}. This cuts across genealogical lines, uniting languages through a common framework. We argue that this P\={a}ninian framework supplies a unifying computational architecture the field has lacked, and that benchmarks grounded explicitly in it would make Indic language systems more accurate, more data-efficient, and more transferable, effectively merging many apparently disparate and sparse Indic language resources into a single high-resource metalanguage bedrock. We propose a four-part benchmark suite to render this shared architecture explicit, measurable, and ready to be leveraged for practical applications. Moreover, we underscore the question it raises for interpretability research: whether neural models trained on these languages come to represent P\={a}nini's categories on their own.

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

Bridging data-driven priors via the score function for posterior sampling – Comparative review and experimental study

arXiv:2606.14800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper reviews how a diverse set of popular data-driven priors commonly used in Bayesian inverse problems can be unified through their respective score functions. By framing these priors under this common perspective, we show that they can benefit from their straightfoward and effective integration into a recently proposed sampling algorithm. The applicability of this common framework is illustrated by considering several data-driven priors, namely regularization-by-denoising, normalizing flow-based priors, score-based generative models, and convex-ridge regularizers. For these four particular priors, the performance of the method is evaluated when conducting image inpainting and single image super-resolution. These results, as well as those obtained when restoring real images acquired in a geological context, demonstrate the efficiency of the method. This unified framework proves versatile enough to handle any posterior distribution defined by a broad class of score function-based priors, beyond the specific cases considered in this paper.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VisCritic: Visual State Comparison as Process Reward for GUI Agents

作者:

GUI agents powered by vision-language models show strong potential for automating digital tasks, yet frequently fail in long-horizon scenarios due to the absence of step-level verification. Existing process reward models verify actions through textual reasoning alone, missing the visual nature of GUI state changes. We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies agent actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots in visual feature space. VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head that jointly evaluates action success, task progress, and error type. A critic-training data construction pipeline generates weakly supervised samples from existing trajectories without additional human labels for critic training. Experiments and offline analyses across five benchmarks demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents, generally improving benchmark metrics while providing visual diagnostic cues.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

Despite recent successes, test-time scaling – i.e., dynamically expanding the token budget during inference as needed – remains brittle for vision-language models (VLMs). Unstructured visual reasoning chains entangle perception and reasoning, leading to long, disorganized contexts where small perceptual mistakes may cascade into completely wrong answers. Reasoning also requires expensive reinforcement learning with hand-crafted rewards. Here, we introduce SPARC (Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits), a modular framework that explicitly decouples visual perception from reasoning. Inspired by sequential sensory-to-cognitive processing in the brain, SPARC implements a two-stage pipeline where the model first performs explicit visual search to localize question-relevant regions, then conditions its reasoning on those regions to produce the final answer. This separation enables independent test-time scaling with asymmetric compute allocation (e.g., prioritizing perceptual processing under distribution shift), and supports selective optimization (e.g., improving the perceptual stage alone when it is the bottleneck for end-to-end performance). It also accommodates compressed contexts by running global search at lower image resolutions and allocating high-resolution processing only to selected regions, thereby reducing visual token count and compute. SPARC outperforms monolithic baselines and strong visual-grounding approaches across challenging visual reasoning tasks, such as improving Qwen3VL 4B on the $V^*$ VQA benchmark by 6.7 points and surpassing "thinking with images" by 4.6 points in an OOD setting with a $200\times$ lower token budget.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing resource bounds in direct fidelity estimation

arXiv:2606.16336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct fidelity estimation provides a way to estimate the fidelity between an experimentally prepared state and a desired pure target state without performing full tomography. Two influential formulations were introduced in 2011 by Flammia and Liu and by da Silva, Landon-Cardinal, and Poulin. In these protocols, the total estimation error is controlled through two distinct probabilistic steps: first, the fidelity is approximated using randomly sampled Pauli observables; second, each sampled expectation value is estimated from finitely many measurement outcomes. In this work we show that additional structural information about the noise can substantially sharpen the corresponding resource bounds. In particular, for some canonical channels the effective number of sampled Pauli settings can be reduced, leading to lower measurement cost both in the general pure-state setting and in the case of a stabilizer state. These results illustrate a broader point: worst-case confidence bounds in direct fidelity estimation can be significantly conservative when experimentally relevant structure is ignored. As a technical ingredient, we also revisit the allocation of the total accuracy and confidence budgets between the two probabilistic steps. Reformulating the analysis in terms of separate error parameters yields a constrained optimization problem whose solution lowers the average number of measurements in the general pure-state setting. Numerical simulations based on quantum circuits implemented in Qiskit illustrate both the improvement obtained under structured-noise assumptions and the conservativeness of the original worst-case bounds.