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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Finite-Sample Bounds for Expected Signature Estimation under Weak Dependence

arXiv:2605.20541v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expected signature uniquely determines the law of a random rough path under a moment-growth condition, yet finite-sample bounds for estimating its truncations from a single long dependent trajectory remain unavailable. We study a strictly stationary stochastic process equipped with a geometric rough-path lift, observed in non-overlapping blocks of equally-spaced samples, and prove a non-asymptotic mean-squared error (MSE) bound for the block-averaging estimator of its truncated expected signature. Under moment and stationarity assumptions together with a direct covariance-decay condition on block signatures – strictly weaker than $\alpha$-mixing and applicable to long-range-dependent processes – the error separates into a discretization term and a fluctuation term, with rates determined respectively by path regularity and dependence strength. A levelwise rough-factorial variance analysis keeps finite-truncation constants explicit and yields an optimal allocation rule under a fixed observation budget. We verify the assumptions for independent-coordinate fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck processes in three regimes: short-range (Hurst $1/41/2$. Monte Carlo experiments show empirical slopes steeper than the guaranteed upper-bound rates.

02.
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.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Context Returns: Toward Robust Internalization in On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.11627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that on-policy distillation can internalize privileged context, such as system prompts or task hints, into a student model so that the context is no longer needed at inference time. Although this approach successfully improves the student's no-context performance, we identify an interesting and previously unstudied phenomenon: in many settings, reintroducing the original privileged context to the distilled student actually degrades its performance, even on instances it already solves correctly without context. We term this context-induced degradation and argue that robust internalization demands not only matching the teacher's context-conditioned behavior, but also remaining stable when the context is reintroduced, a property we call context removability. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight consistency regularizer that first anchors the student's no-context output via stop-gradient, then penalizes the context-conditioned output for deviating from it via forward KL divergence. This simple addition requires only one extra forward pass per training step, yet it effectively mitigates context-induced degradation and, in many cases, even improves no-context performance. Across 12 configurations spanning diverse domains and model families, our method improves context-conditioned accuracy in the majority of settings, reduces context-induced harm in 11 out of 12 settings, and effectively eliminates response-length inflation. A mechanistic case study further confirms that context removability is achieved at the representation level, with hidden states remaining nearly identical regardless of whether the context is present.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Characterizing metric-space-valued processes: separating classes and weak invariance principles for measure-theoretic inference

arXiv:2606.13084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article investigates stochastic processes taking values in metric spaces that lack a topological vector space structure, a regime characterized by intricate interplay between topological, geometric, and temporal dependence structures. It is formally established that spaces admitting an isometric Hilbertian embedding constitute a strict subclass within the much broader class of metric spaces possessing the ball property. While traditional kernel methods are susceptible to geometric distortion when the underlying space cannot be isometrically embedded into a Hilbert space, we bypass such limitations by exploiting a fundamental structural property inherent to this broader class; namely, that Borel probability measures are uniquely determined by their values on balls. These separating classes provide the foundation for the subsequently introduced measure-theoretic inference methodology. We derive uniform convergence of a family of time-dependent random measures, alongside weak invariance principles for the corresponding nonstationary random fields. This framework explicitly exposes how dependence and geometric complexity influence sample path regularity. Furthermore, because the rapid decay of small-ball probabilities can prohibit the existence of limiting distributions for supremum-based discrepancy measures, we develop $L^p$-based alternatives. By directly leveraging the introduced convergence results, this approach circumvents the need for higher-order $U$-process formulations. Finally, for spaces that do admit an isometric Hilbertian embedding, and where $U$-processes naturally arise, we establish limit theory for both degenerate and nondegenerate multi-parameter $U$-processes, and demonstrate that local discrepancy tests maintain asymptotic stability under dynamic parameter regimes.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Towards the Virtual Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Patient: Inferring Cortical Excitability through Whole-Brain Dynamical Modeling

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is increasingly recognized as a multisystem neurodegenerative disorder in which motor-neuron degeneration is accompanied by widespread alterations in cortical dynamics. Among its most reproducible neurophysiological signatures is cortical hyperexcitability, yet how this local excitability imbalance shapes distributed whole-brain activity remains poorly understood. Here, we combined source-reconstructed resting-state MEG data, tractography-informed whole-brain modeling, and simulation-based inference to investigate whether ALS-related alterations in large-scale brain dynamics can be mechanistically explained by changes in cortical excitability. First, we characterized empirical brain dynamics using complementary features spanning regional activity amplitude and variability, functional connectivity, and avalanche-based metrics. These analyses revealed significant alterations in ALS patients relative to healthy controls, as well as associations with clinical impairment and disease staging. To mechanistically interpret these changes, we employed a reduced Wong-Wang whole-brain model in which local recurrent excitation modulates emergent large-scale neural dynamics. Simulations showed that increasing excitability systematically reproduced the empirical dynamical signatures observed in ALS. We then applied a simulation-based inference framework to estimate latent excitability parameters directly from empirical observations. Whole-brain model inversion revealed increased excitability in ALS patients compared with controls. The recovered excitability parameter was associated with disease staging, supporting its clinical relevance as a model-derived descriptor of ALS progression. Finally, by extending the model to estimate frontal and non-frontal excitability separately, we found that ALS-related alterations were predominantly associated with increased frontal excitability, whereas non-frontal regions appeared comparatively less affected. The recovered parameters related to disease staging. Together, these findings provide a mechanistic framework linking altered large-scale brain dynamics in ALS to selective cortical hyperexcitability, explaining how local excitability changes can give rise to global network reorganization. More broadly, they show how computational model inversion can recover latent multiscale pathophysiological processes from empirical neural recordings, offering a non-perturbative alternative to complex experimental paradigms typically required to causally probe local-to-global mechanisms.

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

Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patterns

We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.

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

Detecting Explanatory Insufficiency in Learned Representations: A Framework for Representational Vigilance

arXiv:2606.13172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned representations are central to modern machine learning and are commonly evaluated through predictive performance, robustness, uncertainty estimation, or generalization. However, a learned representation may remain operationally successful while progressively failing to organize persistent residual structures that are not fully captured by conventional evaluation metrics. This article introduces VER, the Vigilant Evaluator of Representations, a conceptual framework for monitoring representational adequacy in learned representations. VER does not propose a new learning algorithm, loss function, or model architecture. Instead, it formalizes a diagnostic process through which persistent residual structures may be identified, analyzed, and interpreted as potential indicators of explanatory insufficiency. The framework distinguishes representational inadequacy from ordinary prediction error, uncertainty, noise, and distribution shift. It introduces a monitoring sequence based on representation identification, explanatory-domain delimitation, residual-structure detection, explanatory-resistance evaluation, and vigilance signaling. VER is intended as a contribution to representation diagnostics in machine learning. Its objective is not to replace existing evaluation methods but to complement them by treating representational adequacy as an explicit object of inquiry. A path toward empirical evaluation through representational-vigilance benchmarks is also outlined.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Robust Neural Tucker Factorization with Bias Correction and Adaptive Initialization

arXiv:2606.16388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional incomplete (HDI) tensors are widely used in traffic and climate applications, but sparse observations make accurate completion difficult. The intrinsic non-linear dynamics and non-stationary variations across distinct multi-modal fields severely hinder the efficacy of conventional linear reconstruction frameworks. Neural Tucker factorization provides an effective framework for modeling high-order interactions among tensor modes. By parameterizing underlying structural characteristics into continuous latent spaces, neural representations circumvent the rigid low-rank constraints of classical algebra. However, its performance can still be affected by implementation-level choices, especially parameter initialization and the bias configuration of the final output mapping. Suboptimal initializations frequently lead to variance explosion across the cubically expanded interaction spaces, driving the subsequent non-linear activation boundaries into severe gradient saturation zones, while the omission of a dedicated translation parameter forces interaction weights to implicitly absorb global statistical deviations. This paper proposes a simple yet effective neural Tucker factorization model with Kaiming initialization and bias correction (KaBiN) for HDI tensor completion. The proposed model utilizes Kaiming uniform initialization for the embedding and Tucker linear parameters, and adopts a simple bias correction in output mapping. By elegantly decoupling global mean shifts from local structural representations, the framework provides a highly stable and well-conditioned optimization landscape. Experiments on three real-world HDI tensor datasets show that KaBiN achieves better performance than the original NeuTucF, while introducing minimal computational overhead.

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

Learning from Own Solutions: Self-Conditioned Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606.18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Semantic Embeddings and the Peripheral Transcriptome in Ischemic Stroke: Connecting Molecular Signatures to NANDA-I Diagnoses

Objective: To construct and evaluate, in an exploratory manner, a pathophysiologic rationale link- ing biological pathways derived from the peripheral transcriptome in ischemic stroke (IS) to nursing diagnoses in the NANDA-I 2024-2026 taxonomy, while emphasizing that this association is not di- rect, deterministic, or automatically inferable from textual similarity with large language models (LLMs). Methods: A computational study was conducted using public secondary data from the Gene Ex- pression Omnibus series GSE16561, which includes 63 peripheral blood samples: 39 from indi- viduals with IS and 24 from healthy controls. The pipeline integrated transcriptomic analysis and functional enrichment, semantic mapping through ClinicalBERT embeddings, and mechanistic and clinical-conceptual judgment using Claude Sonnet 4.6 as a judge. The judgment stage was treated as the central interpretive layer, designed to mediate the transcriptome, pathophysiology, functional manifestation, and NANDA-I diagnosis. Results: The analysis identified a bimodal transcriptomic pattern, with activation of pathways re- lated to innate immunity and suppression of pathways related to adaptive immunity. Semantic map- ping generated 158 pathway-diagnosis pairs. The Spearman correlation between cosine similarity and the mechanistic score was negative and statistically significant (rho = -0.243; p = 2.09e-03), but weak in magnitude. This effect size indicates that semantic similarity explained less than 6% of the variance in mechanistic plausibility, reinforcing the insufficiency of embeddings as a stand- alone criterion. Of the 158 pairs, 14 were classified as high concordance, 8 as moderate, and 136 as divergent. Conclusion: The main value of this study lies in demonstrating that translating biological pathways into nursing diagnoses requires pathophysiologic, functional, and clinical-conceptual mediation. The prioritized pairs represent mechanistically plausible hypotheses for future research, without implying causality, direct clinical confirmation, or immediate care recommendations.

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

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Variational Learning for Insertion-based Generation

arXiv:2606.02133v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Non-monotonic sequence generation methods, such as masked diffusion models, provide a flexible alternative to left-to-right autoregressive modeling by allowing tokens to be generated in non-fixed and prescribed orders. Despite their practical advantages, most existing non-monotonic models are order-agnostic and rely on a fixed-length grid, limiting their ability to support variable-length generation and adaptive insertion order. In this work, we introduce a probabilistic framework for learning insertion order in variable-length insertion models. We formalize a bijective correspondence between insertion trajectories and permutations, which enables an exact reparameterization of the data likelihood as a sum over permutations. Building on this result, we propose the Insertion Process (IP), a stochastic generative model that jointly learns where to insert, what to insert, and when to terminate, trained via permutation-based variational inference. Unlike prior fixed-canvas approaches, IP natively supports variable-length generation and learns data-driven preferences over insertion orders. Experiments on goal-conditioned planning and molecular string generation demonstrate that learning insertion order improves both modeling quality and generalization in domains without a canonical left-to-right structure.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

The clinical utility of functional testing in fibroblasts to diagnose primary mitochondrial disease

Genome sequencing of the heterogeneous primary mitochondrial disorders (PMD) frequently reveals variants of uncertain significance that require functional tests for diagnosis, and does not identify variants in all patients. We analyzed mitochondrial enzyme assays, blue native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (BN-PAGE) with in-gel activity staining, complex I assembly blot, and select protein abundances in fibroblasts of a case series of 204 PMD patients divided into functional classes, in comparison to 51 controls and 53 differential diagnostic conditions. Overall, sensitivity and specificity for respiratory chain enzyme assays were 46% and 93% respectively, for BN-PAGE 40% and 98%, for complex I assembly assay 49% and 99%. The overall sensitivity of all tests was 76%, specificity 93%, with positive predictive value 96% and negative predictive value 67%. Categories with high sensitivity were isolated complex deficiencies, nuclear DNA-encoded mitochondrial protein synthesis defects, co-factor defects, and mitochondrial amino-acyl-tRNA synthetase conditions when aided by protein abundance. Mitochondrial DNA mutations and maintenance disorders showed poor sensitivities. Secondary dysfunctions were rare. A complete battery of functional tests showed strong diagnostic clinical utility in fibroblasts.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A non-asymptotic bound on the TV distance between a Wishart matrix and an appropriately scaled GOE matrix

arXiv:2606.16018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this note, we prove a non-asymptotic version of a theorem by Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Rácz, showing that a Wishart matrix is close in total variation to an affine transformation of a GOE matrix. The proof mirrors the proof given by Bubeck et al., with some changes made to make it non-asymptotic.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection

Object counting in complex scenes is particularly challenging in the zero-shot (ZS) setting, where instances of unseen categories are counted using only a class name. Existing ZS counting methods that infer exemplars from text often rely on off-the-shelf open-vocabulary detectors (OVDs), which in dense scenes suffer from semantic noise, appearance variability, and multi-instance proposals. Alternatively, random image-patch sampling is employed, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. Since counting is sensitive to exemplar quality, such selection strategies often yield poorly representative exemplars, leading to inaccurate count estimation. To address these issues, we propose CountZES, an inference-only approach for object counting via ZS exemplar selection. CountZES discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines OVD detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across domains.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Survey on Data-Driven Models for Soil Moisture Regression and Classification

arXiv:2606.18316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil Moisture (SM) modelling constitutes a complex spatiotemporal learning problem characterised by nonlinear environmental interactions, heterogeneous data sources, and limited ground observations. Physics-based approaches, such as water balance models, rely on explicit hydrological equations and high-quality inputs, but their computational cost and scalability limitations restrict large-scale deployment. Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) methods have emerged as flexible alternatives, enabling the extraction of empirical relationships between soil moisture and environmental variables with reduced modelling assumptions. This work presents a structured survey of AI-based models for soil moisture estimation and classification. Existing approaches are organized into five categories: (a) statistical time-series models, (b) geostatistical methods (c) classical machine learning (ML) models, (d) Deep Learning (DL) models and (e) Probabilistic/Bayesian methods. These models leverage historical soil moisture records, meteorological variables, vegetation indices, topography, soil characteristics, and geolocation data to perform regression or classification tasks.