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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Kinematic properties of the Pauli equation

arXiv:2606.17548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Based on the Wigner-Vlasov formalism, this paper investigates the kinematic properties of the Pauli equation. It is shown that the probability current associated with the Pauli equation can be represented as a superposition of two currents with certain expansion coefficients. Each of these currents corresponds to a particular component of the spinor. The expansion coefficients effectively serve as weighting functions that determine the probability contribution of the corresponding spinor component. Therefore, each spin projection corresponds to its own probability flux. A new system of the Hamilton-Jacobi equations and also a system of motion equations in electromagnetic fields are obtained, taking into account the interaction between the spin and the magnetic field. To illustrate how these equations can be applied we have investigated the quantum system kinematics in detail using an exact solution of the Pauli equation in the presence of a uniform magnetic field and an asymmetric quadratic potential.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Benchmarking Vision Foundation Models for Domain-Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

arXiv:2606.02670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

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

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

FATE: Pillar Encoding and Frequency-Aware Training for Event-Based Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Riviera model with egoistical settlers

arXiv:2606.16791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Riviera model mimics a densifying settlement along the coastline. In the lattice version, houses are built sequentially in empty sites with the constraint that every newly built house has at least one empty neighboring site. The distribution of clusters of adjacent houses does not obey a closed set of evolutionary equations, but the void-cluster-void distribution does. We compute the latter and extract the cluster distribution from it. In the jammed state, when all voids have length one and the evolution ceases, the cluster distribution has a neat form and exhibits a factorial decay with the length of the cluster. To investigate finite systems, we employ a static approach directly treating jammed states. If the coastline is a finite segment, we determine the statistics of the number of empty sites in the jammed state (the average, variance, and higher cumulants). We also study a continuum version in which houses are built along the line so that each newly built house is sufficiently separated from at least one neighboring house.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Spatially Stratified Distillation for Heterogeneous Radar Place Recognition

Scalable, all-weather place recognition increasingly relies on heterogeneous radar place recognition to bridge diverse hardware platforms. A notable application is matching queries from cost-effective 4D automotive radars against high-fidelity reference maps built by dense spinning radars. This process is fundamentally limited by the extreme sparsity (and narrow field-of-view) of the 4D sensor, which captures only a fraction of the structural density present in the spinning radar database. Prior efforts address this issue by unifying different radar signals. That is, projecting both signals into a common representational space. Yet, they suffer performance degradation in multi-session environments. In this paper, we propose spatially-stratified distillation (SSD); a strategy that replaces standard uniform distillation with an asymmetric spatial alignment derived directly from physical radar returns. In regions where both radars exhibit overlapping returns, SSD enforces strong feature alignment. Crucially, in sparse regions where the 4D student lacks returns but the teacher contains valid structure within the shared field of view, SSD applies heavily discounted distillation weights. Extensive evaluations of the recent HeRCULES dataset demonstrate that SSD significantly outperforms prior place recognition methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on its challenging dynamic sequences.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Beyond the Blood Draw: Explainable Machine Learning for Non-Invasive Dysglycemia Risk Screening

arXiv:2606.16056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dysglycemia, encompassing both prediabetes and diabetes, affects huge numbers of adults worldwide, yet many of them remain undiagnosed. We developed and validated machine-learning (ML) models for non-invasive screening of dysglycemia risk that require no laboratory tests. Pooling data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2017–2023 (n=14,352), we trained six ML models with stratified 5-fold cross-validation and compared them with two established clinical risk scores. LightGBM achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC=0.820, 95% CI: 0.806–0.835), outperforming the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (0.745) and American Diabetes Association Risk Test (0.783). SHAP analysis identified age, race/ethnicity, and waist-to-height ratio as the most influential predictors. Subgroup analyses confirmed consistent performance across demographic strata (AUC: 0.735–0.832). These results demonstrate the feasibility of explainable, laboratory-free dysglycemia screening for deployment in community settings and self-tracking health applications.

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

Depth-Width tradeoffs in Algorithmic Reasoning of Graph Tasks with Transformers

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a transformer that can implement the task. Recent work has begun to explore this problem for graph-based tasks, showing that for sub-linear embedding dimension (i.e., model width) logarithmic depth suffices. However, an open question, which we address here, is what happens if width is allowed to grow linearly, while depth is kept fixed. Here we analyze this setting, and provide the surprising result that with linear width, constant depth suffices for solving a host of graph-based problems. This suggests that a moderate increase in width can allow much shallower models, which are advantageous in terms of inference and train time. For other problems, we show that quadratic width is required. Our results demonstrate the complex and intriguing landscape of transformer implementations of graph-based algorithms. We empirically investigate these trade-offs between the relative powers of depth and width and find tasks where wider models have the same accuracy as deep models, while having much faster train and inference time due to parallelizable hardware.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Phishing Email Detection Using Large Language Models

arXiv:2512.10104v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Email phishing is one of the most prevalent and globally consequential vectors of cyber intrusion. As systems increasingly deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) applications, these systems face evolving phishing email threats that exploit their fundamental architectures. Current LLMs require substantial hardening before deployment in email security systems, particularly against coordinated multi-vector attacks that exploit architectural vulnerabilities. This paper proposes LLMPEA, an LLM-based framework to detect phishing email attacks across multiple attack vectors, including prompt injection, text refinement, and multilingual attacks. We evaluate three frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Grok-3) and comprehensive prompting design to assess their feasibility, robustness, and limitations against phishing email attacks. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs can detect the phishing email over 90% accuracy while we also highlight that LLM-based phishing email detection systems could be exploited by adversarial attack, prompt injection, and multilingual attacks. Our findings provide critical insights for LLM-based phishing detection in real-world settings where attackers exploit multiple vulnerabilities in combination.

14.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Starter-Iterator Neural Operator: A Unified Architecture for High-Fidelity Forward and Inverse PDE Problems

arXiv:2606.18305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operator learning is an emerging interdisciplinary field that integrates machine learning with scientific computing. By mapping infinite-dimensional function spaces, this approach provides an efficient surrogate modeling framework for high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). Compared to traditional numerical solvers, it achieves a superior trade-off between computational complexity and approximation accuracy, demonstrating significant advantages in many-query tasks such as real-time prediction and parameter sweeps. Given the stringent accuracy requirements of both forward simulation and inverse inference, as well as the precision bottlenecks of existing operator learning methods in handling complex boundaries or long-term evolution, we propose the Starter-Iterator Neural Operator (SINO). Our framework reinterprets the initialization strategies and iterative formats of traditional iterative methods through neural networks, establishing an efficient approach for spectral-spatiotemporal collaborative modeling. Specifically, the frequency-domain initialization module captures globally stable low-frequency features, while the time-domain learning module focuses on optimizing local solution residuals, thereby effectively overcoming the inherent limitations of conventional single-domain modeling approaches. Extensive experiments on typical dynamical systems such as the Navier-Stokes equations and acoustic wave equations, as well as practical applications including super-resolution imaging and weather forecasting, demonstrate that SINO achieves outstanding performance in numerical accuracy, generalization capability, and robustness.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Diabetes and the Life-Course: Evidence from Panel Data and Electronic Health Records

Incidence of type 2 diabetes is increasing at ages when education, work, family, and financial transitions are taking place, yet we lack robust evidence of whether earlier treatment changes life-course outcomes and over which time span this takes place. This paper uses the medical cutoff for diabetes diagnosis (HbA1c of 6.5 percent) as a natural experiment to study the effects of diabetes treatment using electronic health records (EHR) and panel data. This paper has three main findings. First, using EHR data, we find that there is a sharp increase in the probability of both diagnosis of diabetes and prescription when the HbA1c equals 6.5 percent. Second, we find that treating diabetes reduces HbA1c levels, weight, BMI, and blood pressure and increases the amount of care received, proxied by the number of HbA1c tests. Both the diagnosis and a prescription are independently able to produce positive changes in metabolic health, although a prescription is more effective in this regard. Third, we conclude that treating diabetes does not have a significant effect on life-course outcomes for a cohort of young Americans aged 24-32, although it does result in a reduction in HbA1c levels that are seen even eight years after the intervention. Taken together, these findings suggest that receiving a diagnosis and prescription are both effective treatments for diabetes, but they do not translate to significant alterations in the lives of young adults in the medium-term.

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

Conditional Attribution for Root Cause Analysis in Time-Series Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2604.17616v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Root cause analysis (RCA) for time-series anomaly detection is critical for the reliable operation of complex real-world systems. Existing explanation methods often rely on unrealistic feature perturbations and ignore temporal and cross-feature dependencies, leading to unreliable attributions. We propose a conditional attribution framework that explains anomalies relative to contextually similar normal system states. Instead of using marginal or randomly sampled baselines, our method retrieves representative normal instances conditioned on the anomalous observation, enabling dependency-preserving and operationally meaningful explanations. To support high-dimensional time-series data, contextual retrieval is performed in learned low-dimensional representations using both variational autoencoder latent spaces and UMAP manifold embeddings. By grounding the retrieval process in the system's learned manifold, this strategy avoids out-of-distribution artifacts and ensures attribution fidelity while maintaining computational efficiency. We further introduce confidence-aware and temporal evaluation metrics for assessing explanation reliability and responsiveness. Experiments on the SWaT and MSDS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves root-cause identification accuracy, temporal localization, and robustness across multiple anomaly detection models. These results highlight the practical utility of conditional attribution for explainable anomaly diagnosis in complex time-series systems. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/dfki-av/Conditional-Attribution-for-Root-Cause-Analysis-in-Time-Series-Anomaly-Detection.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

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

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reconfigurable Computing Challenge: Transformer for Jet Tagging on Versal AI Engines

arXiv:2606.17500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based models achieve strong performance for jet tagging at the CERN LHC, but deploying them in low-latency, resource-constrained trigger systems is challenging. We present an initial implementation of a quantized, integer-only transformer for jet tagging on the AMD Versal AI Engine (AIE), mapping dense and multi-head attention (MHA) layers to AIE tiles. The main contribution is a reusable software framework that represents transformer layers as composable AIE building blocks and automatically generates the corresponding Vitis graph code from a high-level Python model description. This framework provides a foundation for future research and is released as open-source software at https://github.com/KastnerRG/particle_transformer_aie.

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

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Simplifying the Modeling of Arbitrary Conditionals in Natural Language

Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals – e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals – including past, future, and mixed contexts – within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.