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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AI Supply Chain Galaxy: 3D Visual Analytics for License Compliance

arXiv:2606.16292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of machine learning model reuse has transformed the AI ecosystem into a highly interconnected supply chain. Traditional compliance tools and static reports struggle to navigate these massive, multi-hop dependency networks. To address this, we present AI Supply Chain Galaxy (AISCG), an interactive 3D visual analytics system for model provenance and compliance auditing. AISCG maps models into a 3D spatial layout, integrating explicit structural dependencies with a rule-based compliance engine. It supports multi-scale exploration, from global community detection to localized, path-aware lineage tracing. We demonstrate its efficacy through an ecosystem-scale empirical analysis of 908,449 models from Hugging Face. Our findings reveal a concerning landscape: 55.46% of models exhibit compliance risks or metadata conflicts/omissions. We also identified distinct risk patterns, including a 56.67% license omission rate in adapter derivations and an 8.05% "license drift" rate in fine-tuning. Through a case study on the complex Llama model family, we show how AISCG empowers analysts to intuitively trace inherited restrictive terms and identify root causes across deep topological networks, significantly reducing the cognitive load of compliance auditing.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Language Models as Interfaces, Not Oracles: A Hybrid LLM-ML System for Pediatric Appendicitis

Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Effective Resistances and Commute Times in Sparse Random Geometric Graphs

arXiv:2606.14895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The commute time between two nodes in a network - the expected number of steps for a random walk to travel from one node to the other and then return - is a metric of broad importance arising in community detection, network routing, dimensionality reduction, and diffusion modeling. For random geometric graphs (RGGs), in which nodes are placed at random in a spatial domain and connected pairwise wherever their Euclidean distance is below a threshold radius, the relationship between commute times and the embedding geometry remains poorly understood outside very dense settings (where the role of the geometry disappears and commute times degenerate to a sum of inverse degrees). We develop and numerically validate a model for approximating commute times in sparse RGGs on a torus by combining theoretically motivated geometric contributions with an inverse degree sum. The geometric terms include a universal logarithmic contribution from the Laplacian, a quadratic correction encoding the compact topology of the torus, and a quartic angular term reflecting the square anisotropy of the domain. We fit this model to samples of node pairs across a range of graph sizes and mean degrees, demonstrating good predictive performance and that the geometric terms contribute significantly to model fit. We then study the continuous perturbation of the model from a regular square lattice to a fully random geometric graph, further validating the functional model form through this transition and showing how commute times in sparse RGGs retain meaningful geometric information about the embedding space.

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

Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorization; (ii) VLM-Lagrange, an augmented multiplier update that incorporates a per-step VLM cost as an anticipatory term; (iii) Confidence Gating, a Bayes-optimal weight derived from a logistic noise model on the CLIP margin; and (iv) VLMPPOLag, the composed algorithm. On Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne L2, our principal evaluation ($n{=}5$ seeds, $10^{6}$ steps, budget $d_{lim}{=}25$) VLMPPOLag$+$Conf is the only configuration in our default budget comparison that simultaneously retains substantive return ($J_r{\approx}40$) and holds cost within budget on a majority of seeds; the five constraint-aware baselines (PPOLag, CPO, CPPOPID, CPO-CLG, PPOLag-RND) each fail at least one requirement. The mechanism generalizes to held-out MetaDrive Medium (catastrophe rate $41\%{\to}26\%$, 95\% bootstrap CI $[-26,-5]$\,pp) and shows directionally consistent transfer to Bullet Safety-Gym; we report honestly where it does not (MetaDrive Easy/Hard, Qwen2-VL backbone) and trace the Hard failure to a Lagrangian-regulation pathology rather than the VLM signal itself. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use frozen VLM signals as an anticipatory cost term inside the CMDP Lagrangian update.

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

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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

Continual Quadruped Robots Coordination via Semantic Skill Discovery

arXiv:2606.08102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Where a Quantum Reservoir Works: A Transferable Operating Band

arXiv:2606.13284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantum reservoir computing, a fixed quantum system transforms an input signal, while learning reduces to training a simple linear readout on its measured outputs. Since the quantum dynamics themselves are never optimized, the method is well suited to today's hardware. Yet these dynamics must still be chosen carefully, because their settings remain fixed throughout training and inference. It therefore remains an open question where, in its control space, a fixed quantum system learns well. We address this question for a dissipative reservoir by mapping performance over three central physical controls: the strength of the input drive, the coupling between neighboring qubits, and the rate of dissipation. Good performance concentrates in a single, well-defined operating region of this control space. This region transfers across tasks and reservoir initializations, and the same memory-defined regime persists under architectural changes. It is also mechanistically grounded, since it disappears whenever any of the mechanisms that create it is removed. Finally, the region can be located cheaply before any task is run, using a simple memory diagnostic.

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

Can AI Reason Like an Urban Planner? Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Professional Judgment

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowledge often treated as lower-order is deeply shaped by institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal context, making it hard for LLMs to generalize. We summarize these limits as four epistemic diagnostics: regulatory hallucination, conceptual conflation, wickedness paralysis, and phronetic deficit. Takeaway for Practice: The findings support differential delegation in planning. LLMs can assist with cross-disciplinary synthesis, literature review, scenario generation, and preliminary policy analysis. However, they remain unreliable for jurisdiction-specific regulation, normative conflict resolution, and context-sensitive procedure. Agencies should require verification for AI-assisted regulatory analysis, while planning education should emphasize institutional literacy, normative judgment, and contextual sensitivity.

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

A Streaming Sparse Cholesky Method for Derivative-Informed Gaussian Process Surrogates Within Digital Twin Applications

arXiv:2511.00366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Digital twins are developed to model the behavior of a specific physical asset (or twin), and they can consist of high-fidelity physics-based models or surrogates. A highly accurate surrogate is often preferred over multi-physics models as they enable forecasting the physical twin future state in real-time. To adapt to a specific physical twin, the digital twin model must be updated using in-service data from that physical twin. In this paper, we combine and extend several previous surrogate-related advancements with the goal of demonstrating an end-to-end digital twin (DT) solution for predicting performance of an aircraft structure (the physical asset). To this end, we extend Gaussian process (GP) models to include derivative data, for improved accuracy, with dynamic updating to ingest physical twin data during service. Including derivative data, however, comes at a prohibitive cost of increased covariance matrix dimension. We circumvent this issue through our modified dynamic sparse Cholesky linear system solver. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the prediction accuracy of the derivative-enhanced sparse Cholesky GP method produces improved models upon dynamic data additions. Lastly, we demonstrate the developed algorithm within a DT framework to model fatigue crack growth in an aerospace vehicle, thereby exhibiting through our assembled engineered system how digital twin technologies can be combined in practice.

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

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Dummy Backdoor as a Defense: Removing Unknown Backdoors via Shared Internal Mechanisms for Generative LLMs

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the safety and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), as they cause models to behave normally on clean inputs while producing attacker-specified responses when hidden triggers are present. Removing such unknown backdoors is particularly challenging when the defender does not know the backdoor attack types or the internal mechanisms formed through backdoor training. In this work, we propose a simple but effective backdoor removal method based on shared internal mechanisms across different backdoors. First, we show that different backdoors with the same task (attack objective) induce similar trigger-activated changes in the internal activations. Motivated by this observation, our method intentionally embeds a backdoor with a known trigger (dummy backdoor) and then removes it through further fine-tuning on dummy-triggered inputs paired with clean responses. Since the dummy backdoor and the unknown backdoor can rely on shared internal mechanisms, removing the dummy backdoor also reduces the effect of the unknown backdoor. We evaluate our method on three backdoor attack types across multiple model families. Experimental results show that our method substantially reduces the attack success rate of the unknown backdoor while preserving model utility, outperforming representative existing defense methods in both backdoor removal effectiveness and utility preservation. These findings suggest that a defender-controllable backdoor can serve as a helpful proxy for mitigating unknown backdoors in generative LLMs.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Unveiling coherent dynamics in non-Markovian open quantum systems: exact expression and recursive perturbation expansion

arXiv:2506.04097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a systematic framework to derive the effective Hamiltonian governing the coherent dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems. By applying the minimal dissipation principle, we uniquely isolate the coherent contribution to the time-local generator of the reduced dynamics. We derive a general expression for the effective Hamiltonian and develop a recursive perturbative expansion that expresses it in terms of system-bath interaction terms and bath correlation functions. This expansion provides a systematic tool for analyzing energy renormalization effects across different coupling regimes. Applying our framework to paradigmatic spin systems, we reveal how environmental correlations influence energy shifts and eigenbasis rotations, offering new insights into strong-coupling effects and non-Markovian quantum thermodynamics.

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

Neural Architectures as Functional Priors in Physics-Informed Control Problems

arXiv:2606.19368v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work we investigate the role of neural architectures as implicit functional priors in control problems governed by ordinary differential equations. Rather than focusing on highly complex problems, our objective is to investigate architecture-dependent effects in controlled dynamical systems within the simplest physically interpretable settings possible. In particular, we study a controlled linear RLC electrical circuit and a nonlinear Duffing-type dynamical system. Both systems are analyzed first through classical optimal-control formulations and later through PINN-based approaches. We compare different combinations of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and Fourier-based KAN-like architectures, and analyze their influence on the resulting controls. The numerical experiments suggest that different architectural choices systematically generate qualitatively distinct controls, even under identical governing equations, loss functionals, initial and target states, training parameters and physical constraints. Significant differences appear in the spectral structure, smoothness, energy distribution, and phase-space behavior of the learned solutions. A central observation of this work is the emergence of a functional specialization phenomenon when the neural architectures are allowed sufficient freedom to shape the structure of the learned controls. More specifically, in the systems considered here, Fourier-based architectures tend to produce trajectories with richer oscillatory content, whereas smoother low-frequency-biased architectures tend to generate more regular and energetically efficient controls. This suggests that different functional components of the control problem may be handled more efficiently by different neural architectures, leading to an implicit specialization between state representation and control generation.

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

Separable Neural Architectures as Physical World Models: from Mathematical Theory to Applications

arXiv:2606.14934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces the Separable Neural Architecture (SNA), a function representational class combining neural approximation with tensor decomposition. The SNA decouples localized coordinate functions (atoms) from global interactions governed by a sparse, low-rank interaction object. This architecture possesses a compact and smooth inductive bias well-suited for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). When viewed as a Galerkin trial space under the variational SNA (VSNA) framework, the formulation satisfies classical variational guarantees under Lax-Milgram: well-posedness, quasi-optimality, convergence, and stability. In high-dimensional spatiotemporal–parametric PDEs, the VSNA mitigates the curse of dimensionality by scaling algebraically rather than exponentially. Exploiting an entirely factorized, tensor-native alternating least squares (ALS) optimization framework reduces this cost to linear in dimension. The VSNA is validated across elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic systems, demonstrating close alignment with predicted algebraic and spectral scaling rates. We showcase the SNA as a "solve once, query anywhere" physical world model via two engineering case studies: a 7D parametric manufacturing simulation and an experimental thermal-to-property inversion pipeline for Inconel 718. The VSNA executes a 1,000,000-query Monte Carlo sweep in 102s on a standard laptop CPU, yielding a 150,000x speedup over a full-grid finite element baseline hosted on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. It further enables real-time generative inverse-mode reconstructions under 100ms. These results demonstrate that the SNA serves as a compact mathematical substrate for continuous parameter manifolds to enable real-time inversion, optimization loops, and rapid uncertainty propagation.

17.
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.

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

LLM-ODDR: A Large Language Model Framework for Joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning

arXiv:2505.22695v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ride-hailing platforms face significant challenges in optimizing order dispatching and driver repositioning operations in dynamic urban environments. Traditional approaches based on combinatorial optimization, rule-based heuristics, and reinforcement learning often overlook driver income fairness, interpretability, and adaptability to real-world dynamics. To address these gaps, we propose LLM-ODDR, a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for joint Order Dispatching and Driver Repositioning (ODDR) in ride-hailing services. LLM-ODDR framework comprises three key components: (1) Multi-objective-guided Order Value Refinement, which evaluates orders by considering multiple objectives to determine their overall value; (2) Fairness-aware Order Dispatching, which balances platform revenue with driver income fairness; and (3) Spatiotemporal Demand-Aware Driver Repositioning, which optimizes idle vehicle placement based on historical patterns and projected supply. We also develop JointDR-GPT, a fine-tuned model optimized for ODDR tasks with domain knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets from Manhattan taxi operations demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of effectiveness, adaptability to anomalous conditions, and decision interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration of LLMs as decision-making agents in ride-hailing ODDR tasks, establishing foundational insights for integrating advanced language models within intelligent transportation systems. While the current framework incurs higher computational costs than traditional methods, we show that parallel decomposition and model distillation can reduce latency to production-viable levels for deployment.

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

All-valid-state HOBO encoding for constrained combinatorial optimization on NISQ devices

arXiv:2606.20017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continued advancements in quantum computing have stimulated growing interest in translating quantum technologies into real-world applications. Consequently, the investigation of practically motivated NP-hard problems is of significant value. This study investigates the performance of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) in addressing the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) through noiseless simulations representative of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices using higher-order binary optimization (HOBO) encodings. We construct a HOBO Hamiltonian with an efficient binary representation and propose an all-valid-state HOBO (AVS-HOBO) scheme based on cyclic mapping that eliminates one penalty term and reuses states that would otherwise be invalid. Using TSP instances of up to 20 cities, we compare the original HOBO and AVS-HOBO encodings from multiple perspectives, including the energy convergence behavior and the approximation, tour-length, and feasibility ratios. In addition to simulations, we perform computations on real quantum hardware with different device architectures, where we not only compare the performances of different chips but also investigate the effects of different error-mitigation methods on actual quantum machines. The results indicate that AVS-HOBO encoding enhances the practical reliability of VQE on NISQ devices and improves scalability for larger TSP instances, with broader applicability to constrained quantum optimization problems.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

An Extensible and Lightweight Unified Architecture for Demosaicing Pixel-bin Image Sensors

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Doeblin Curves

arXiv:2606.19859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent research on Doeblin coefficients has shed light on their usefulness as a multi-way generalization of the Dobrushin contraction coefficient for TV distance, in a separate vein from their classic role in the theory of Markov chain ergodicity. However, strong conditions, such as being bounded away from 0, are typically necessary for Doeblin coefficients to establish the existence of information contraction. Building on recently formulated concepts of nonlinear information contraction, we aim to propose a finer-grained Doeblin-based characterization of multi-way contraction behavior which yields non-vacuous contraction guarantees even for channels whose Doeblin coefficient is 0. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Doeblin curve – a nonlinear function which quantifies the contraction behavior of a Markov kernel on collections of input distributions at specific levels of divergence and power. Through the course of our analysis, we develop a new variational characterization of Doeblin coefficients, present several properties of Doeblin curves, define several versions of power-constrained Doeblin curves, and derive upper and lower bounds using our aforementioned variational characterization. We then utilize these results in diverse areas, including generalization bounds for noisy iterative optimization, error bounds for reliable computation with noisy circuits, and differential privacy guarantees for online iterative algorithms. In particular, we extend results in these areas to broader domains or group settings, leveraging Doeblin curves to reveal finer-grained contraction phenomena than Doeblin coefficients.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ASRU: Activation Steering Meets Reinforcement Unlearning for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining, making machine unlearning (MU) crucial. Existing methods typically evaluate unlearning effectiveness based on output deviations, while overlooking the generation quality after unlearning. This can easily lead to hallucinated or rigid responses, thereby affecting the usability and safety of the unlearned model. To address this issue, we propose ASRU, a controllable multimodal unlearning framework that incorporates generation quality as a core evaluation objective. ASRU first induces initial refusal behavior through activation redirection, and then optimizes fine-grained refusal boundaries using a customized reward function, thereby achieving a better trade-off between target knowledge unlearning and model utility. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that ASRU significantly improves unlearning effectiveness (+24.6%) on average and generation quality (5.8X) on average while effectively preserving model utility, using only a small amount of retained supervision data.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.